https://ft.io — mostly blogging about product management.
Readit Newsftio commented on Ask HN: Share your personal website · Posted by u/susam
God I hope there's enough engagement on this tweet that they actually do it.
I don’t really understand why or how it’s happening, but my HP LaserJet printer connects to Wi-Fi less and less reliably every year. I want to upgrade to a color laser, but: (1) Wirecutter's current rec is for another HP, and (2) it's $750.
The HP inkjet I got in 1997 was far more reliable, even before we switched from parallel to USB. And it could print banners!
ftio commented on Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century worldhistory.substack.com... · Posted by u/crescit_eundo
Until today, my only awareness of the term “gutta percha” was as a type of golf ball, as noted in the article. I’ve always assumed it was someone’s name, or else a nickname for a design. What a cool material!
ftio commented on The beauty of a text only webpage albanbrooke.com/the-beaut... · Posted by u/speckx
I quite enjoy reading Chris Siebenmann's blog [https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/] which is very light on theming, as I really like the aesthetic. I have to say though, if all blogs were like this the Internet might seem a bit boring, so I chose to give my own blog some personality.
When I first built my current site, it was fully unstyled like Chris', but as I started making little tweaks, they snowballed into a proper design. I couldn't help but add more of my personality to it.
Part of the joy of having a personal website that nobody reads is that it can act as a playground, and the design is part of that.
This is inspiring.
Over a decade of commitment to the task itself, diligent blogging of the whole experience, and a website design that brings me back to my favorite time on the web. Beautiful.
ftio commented on Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen cybercultural.com/p/web-d... · Posted by u/panic
Teenage me thought there was NOTHING cooler than a flashy splash page and those micro bitmap fonts a la "silkscreen".
Who am I kidding I still think it's awesome.
8pt Tahoma is the GOAT and I miss it desperately.
I remember vividly when Windows (XP I think?) introduced a new kind of font smoothing that messed with the look of those fonts. In hindsight, I feel like that moment was part of the catalyst toward Web 2.0-style designs. Screens started to get bigger, sites became higher resolution as bandwidth increased, and the tiny pixel font started to be both less relevant (you could fit more, larger text onscreen) and less beautiful (it rendered differently with font smoothing).
IIRC this shift also coincided with the shift toward Wordpress, including a more homogeneous set of pre-packaged "themes", and away from custom CMSes (or no CMS at all), the OG blogging "scripts" like Greymatter and b2.
I generate the Bookmarks [1] section of my static site from the public bookmarks in my Pinboard account.
Since I host with Netlify, I've written a lightweight Netlify function that looks at my Pinboard account for changes. If there are changes, it simply re-runs the static site build. During the build, Lektor, the static site generator, runs a custom plugin I've written that generates the link blog page from the Pinboard API.
Definitely more work than it was "worth", but as a person who doesn't get to write lots of code every day, it was a blast putting it all together.
ftio commented on Starship Flight 5: Launch and booster catch [video] twitter.com/SpaceX/status... · Posted by u/alecco
What an incredible achievement. Huge congratulations to the team at SpaceX! Still have chills.
Anyone know whether the fire toward the bottom of the booster during/after the catch is normal?
ftio commented on Music Industry's 1990s Hard Drives Are Dying arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/m463
Other than continuously copying files to new media every so often, are there reliable digital mechanisms for long-term storage (say, 50 years)?
It is standard for web elements. Very easy to set border radius
That hasn’t always been true!
I remember with great displeasure the bad old days of creating a 3x3 table for every container and jamming a rounded corner gif into each of the four corners to create this effect.