Very informative beginner's guide to testing React websites using Jest and the React Testing Library.

A great talk from Jackie about the potential future evolution for the IndieWeb, with some exceptional quotes. Feels like it hit on my own worries/interests around the movement, in particular with the idea of lowering the barrier of entry for being part of it.

Our mission isn't necessarily to replace social media, but to acknowledge that the web is the initial social network and that we should be complementing and extending it versus closing it off.

There's a way to speak to your plumber and a way to speak with the person who needs to live in the house with the plumbing.

Also, damn this is a great slogan for the IndieWeb movement:

We build for ourselves so we can interact with one another.

Sarah has put into words some feelings I've had recently about the web (and uses two sites as examples that I keep returning to as well: Josh W Comeau and Cassie Codes) :

The small delights and touches, the little a-ha moments, make me STAY. I wander around the site, exploring, learning, feeling actually more connected to each of these humans rather than as if I’m glancing at a PDF of their resume.

Basically, the web should be joyous. It's a space unlike any other, where creativity can take multiple forms, yet it increasingly feels like a collection of corporate cookie cutters. It's not just about personal impact, either. Sites that make you enjoy using them keep you coming back. They increase engagement. They decrease bounce rates. It's win-win. Plus, you can start small, as Sarah says, by just introducing little easter eggs or moments of flair.

If something is meaningful to you, the audience you’ll gather will likely be the folks that find it meaningful, too.

Brilliant resource for the identification of dragonflies, damselflies, and demoiselle species found in the UK with excellent reference photography.

Neat little app and citizen-science project, eBird looks like it could be a useful way of tracking twitching sightings. Wonder if they have an API?

...the NYPD currently has a $6bn budget, let next year's be $300m, and let them fight over it. Bonus! You've got $5.7bn for decarbonization efforts.

What... 😯

That means the NYPD has almost one-third of NASA's budget ($22.8bn). How?! The rest of Pablo's article is a great summary of why we need to rethink the justice systems that are in place, particularly in the US (though the UK is far from innocent). He also makes some excellent points about working at companies like Facebook and how far walkouts actually work.

Next time? Take down the site and APIs until Mark and Sheryl come to the table.

That people can be bought into brutalizing others sucks, but it's a reality I accept; if you're going to do it, it's insulting to have our future sold for so fucking cheap.

An enhanced version of the <datalist> element that uses a tiny amount of additional CSS and JS to modernise the element and bring additional functionality to it.

A wonderful tale about how a handful of individuals are purchasing huge quantities of micro-apartments in London, renting them out under thousands of fake accounts across sites like Airbnb, and making a huge amount of money from it in the process (whilst obviously side-stepping rental laws, health and safety requirements, etc.).

As the short-term rental goldrush gathers pace, Airbnb empires are being rapidly scaled and monetised, with professional operators creating scores of fake accounts, fake listings and fake reviews to run rings around Airbnb, local law enforcement and the guests who place their trust in the platform.

Yet, for many, this is what Airbnb has become: a thin sharing-economy veneer hiding a vast slurry of unscrupulous profiteers.

A great overview of the IndieWeb movement, core technologies, and defining principles.

An incredible online project that has mapped Charles Booth's highly detailed, hand-drawn maps of London in the late 1800s with the Google API, allowing you to compare them to the modern map quickly. Booth was a socialist who spent years walking around London and drawing out each neighbourhood into "poverty maps" that showed which streets showed signs of wealth or neglect, as well as logging policing activity in the area. It's an immensely intricate snapshot of the period and a very neat project.

A simple way to look at what [contain] provides is that we can give hints to the browser about the relationships of the various elements on the page.

The general idea is apply it to elements that are containers of other elements, especially those with some form of dynamic aspect to them.

An interesting viewpoint on the IndieWeb movement that gels with my worries about is this going anywhere? Is it all just a lot of work for nothing?

Like hobbyists with ham radios, it won't go away entirely (thank God), but… it'll only be populated by the kind of people who hang out on ham radios.

On another note, I'm not sure federation is the answer. It's better than a private, unprofitable centralized company for sure, but could we build truly decentralized systems?