Tyler Gaw:

Good Internet is still here […it] may take effort to find. You probably won’t see it in a feed. It will not have likes and RTs. It might be months old by the time you see it. But, it’ll be here. Waiting.

The links Tyler has in his post are really fun!

I’d tell you what they are and share them here, but that would defeat the whole purpose. That is the “old” internet: follow my link, to his links, and who knows where you’ll end up from there!

Good luck on your journey.

Tyler Gaw:

Claude’s first question was why I wanted to do this. After I called it a clanker and told it to never question me I explained that local LLMs are something I’m very interested in. Having everything contained to your system, with no calls to outside systems just feels cool. Feels almost subversive. Any day I can build something that is not beholden to the whims of an Evil Corp is a good day. Today just wasn’t that day.

I love a blog post that follows the pattern: “Failing at ____”.

Tyler Gaw side projects:

Side projects are an exercise in fun. An opportunity to try out new things. Things that are slow, don’t scale, manual. Many things that would be deemed “not best practice” in day-to-day work.

Love that! Also:

The last thing I’d want is for someone to describe the design as “simple and clean”. What an insult.

If I had personality, like Tyler, I’d show some too lol.

Tyler view transitions coming onto the web design scene:

As with all design elements, it will take restraint to design compelling transitions that aren’t annoying. I’m certain we’ll go too far and have to reel it back it. So it goes.

I made the classic mistake. I started out with small updates; type, color, logo. And published those posts after each chunk of work. But then? I made a mess. I made a git branch with the ominous name "rebuild." So, of course, that turned into an amorphous catch-all.

Been there. Done that.

That leads to feelings of lack of accomplishment and a constant feeling of something in the distance that you know you want to get to, but can't will yourself to move towards. I guess? I dunno? Who knows? What was I even talking about? Oh yeah. Web design.

Tyler updated his site and I absolutely love it.

Tyler reflecting on the rationale and process in his color choices. In a world where we’re constantly creating static digital mockups as the artifacts for gathering consensus to build something, this is a good reminder to constantly question: is this design meant to be looked at, or actually used?

Letting contrast ratios influence aesthetic decisions can be a little uncomfortable. As an experienced designer, I have a trained eye that I trust to choose colors that work well and look good. But, that’s not the whole story. My instincts towards subtlety often lead to colors that look fantastic, but are low in contrast. Low contrast text can be difficult for people to see. Color needs more than my instincts alone. So I let go of a bit of control.

Letting go can produce great results. Results that make a design accessible and enjoyable to more people.

To use a GitHub backend with NetlifyCMS, you have to have your own server to handle OAuth. This is a requirement of GitHub’s authentication flow. The good news about that, is that it’s a standard OAuth flow. The bad news about that, is that it’s a standard OAuth flow.

This is what I love about Tyler’s writing. So approachable. He writes how my brain thinks and my heart feels when I’m trying to wrangle computers to do stuff.

What I needed to do was build my own server to handle the OAuth flow. This is a thing I’ve done and written about before. OAuth is like that for me. I set it up. Deploy it. Forget it. Then have to give myself a refresher to do again. That’s what the server example in this post is.

If you’re not following his writing, you should.