Jeremy Keith

Sanborn Fire Maps

A complete digital archive of the famous typography from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

The lettering really is lovely!

Authors Together

In 2024, A Book Apart closed its doors after publishing a much-loved collection of more than 50 brief books for people who make websites. The rights to each book have reverted to the authors — hi, that’s us — and we’ve put together this semi-official directory to help you find our books in their new homes.

…now including Going Offline.

THE AI CON - How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want

A shame that this must-read book won’t be out in time for Christmas—’twould make a great stocking filler for a lot of people I know.

A smart, incisive look at the technologies sold as artificial intelligence, the drawbacks and pitfalls of technology sold under this banner, and why it’s crucial to recognize the many ways in which AI hype covers for a small set of power-hungry actors at work and in the world.

How Undersea Cables Connect the Global Internet

Cables!

JSX.lol - Does anybody actually like React?

I’m subscribing to this RSS feed.

This year I decided I wanted to get better at speaking Irish.

Like everyone brought up in Ireland, I sort of learned the Irish language in school. It was a compulsory subject, along with English and maths.

But Irish wasn’t really taught like a living conversational language. It was all about learning enough to pass the test. Besides, if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to put me off something, it’s making it compulsory.

So for the first couple of decades of my life, I had no real interest in the Irish language, just as I had no real interest in traditional Irish music. They were both tainted by some dodgy political associations. They were both distinctly uncool.

But now? Well, Irish traditional music rules my life. And I’ve come to appreciate the Irish language as a beautiful expressive thing.

I joined a WhatsApp group for Irish language learners here in Brighton. The idea is that we’d get together to attempt some converstation as Gaeilge but we’re pretty lax about actually doing that.

Then there’s Duolingo. I started …playing? doing? Not sure what the verb is.

Duolingo is a bit of a mixed bag. I think it works pretty well for vocabulary acquisition. But it’s less useful for grammar. I was glad that I had some rudiments of Irish from school or I would’ve been completely lost.

Duolingo will tell you what the words are, but it never tells you why. For that I’m going to have to knuckle down with some Irish grammar books, videos, or tutors.

Duolingo is famous for its gamification. It mostly worked on me. I had to consciously remind myself sometimes that the purpose was to get better at Irish, not to score more points and ascend a league table.

Oh, did I ascend that league table!

But I can’t take all the credit. That must go to Coco, the cat.

It’s not that Coco is particularly linguistically gifted. Quite the opposite. She never says a word. But she did introduce a routine that lent itself to doing Duolingo every day.

Coco is not our cat. But she makes herself at home here, for which we feel inordinately honoured.

Coco uses our cat flap to come into the house pretty much every morning. Then she patiently waits for one of us to get up. I’m usually up first, so I’m the one who gives Coco what she wants. I go into the living room and sit on the sofa. Coco then climbs on my lap.

It’s a lovely way to start the day.

But of course I can’t just sit there alone with my own thoughts and a cat. I’ve got to do something. So rather than starting the day with some doomscrolling, I start with some Irish on Duolingo.

After an eleven-month streak, something interesting happened; I finished.

I’m not used to things on the internet having an end. Had I been learning a more popular language I’m sure there would’ve been many more lessons. But Irish has a limited lesson plan.

Of course the Duolingo app doesn’t say “You did it! You can delete the app now!” It tries to get me to do refresher exercises, but we both know that there are diminishing returns and we’d just be going through the motions. It’s time for us to part ways.

I’ve started seeing other apps. Mango is really good so far. It helps that they’ve made some minority languages available for free, Irish included.

I’m also watching programmes on TG4, the Irish language television station that has just about everything in its schedule available online for free anywhere in the world. I can’t bring myself to get stuck into Ros na Rún, the trashy Irish language soap opera, but I have no problem binging on CRÁ, the gritty Donegal crime drama.

There are English subtitles available for just about everything on TG4. I wish that Irish subtitles were also available—it’s really handy to hear and read Irish at the same time—but only a few shows offer that, like the kid’s cartoon Lí Ban.

Oh, and I’ve currently got a book on Irish grammar checked out of the local library. So now when Coco comes to visit in the morning, she can keep me company while I try to learn from that.

Tabloid: the clickbait headline programming language

Tabloid is a turing-complete programming language for writing programs in the style of clickbait news headlines.

Trains are offices | hidde.blog

This tracks (ahem) with my experience of coding on trains.

Hidde lists the potentially flaky connectivity as a downside, but for many kinds of deep work I’d say it’s very much a feature, not a bug.

If Not React, Then What? - Infrequently Noted

Put the kettle on; it’s another epic data-driven screed from Alex. The footnotes on this would be a regular post on any other blog (and yes, even the footnotes have footnotes).

This is a spot-on description of the difference between back-end development and front-end development:

Code that runs on the server can be fully costed. Performance and availability of server-side systems are under the control of the provisioning organisation, and latency can be actively managed by developers and DevOps engineers.

Code that runs on the client, by contrast, is running on The Devil’s Computer. Nothing about the experienced latency, client resources, or even available APIs are under the developer’s control.

Client-side web development is perhaps best conceived of as influence-oriented programming. Once code has left the datacenter, all a web developer can do is send thoughts and prayers.

As a result, an unreasonably effective strategy is to send less code. In practice, this means favouring HTML and CSS over JavaScript, as they degrade gracefully and feature higher compression ratios. Declarative forms generate more functional UI per byte sent. These improvements in resilience and reductions in costs are beneficial in compounding ways over a site’s lifetime.

You can use Web Components without the shadow DOM

So what are the advantages of the Custom Elements API if you’re not going to use the Shadow DOM alongside it?

1. Obvious Markup
2. Instantiation is More Consistent
3. They’re Progressive Enhancement Friendly

I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.

If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.

Needless to say the web book works offline. Once you go to goingoffline.adactio.com you can add it to the homescreen of your mobile device or add it to the dock on your Mac. After that, you won’t need a network connection.

The book is free to read. Properly free. Not the kind of “free” where you have to supply an email address first. Why would I make you go to the trouble of generating a burner email account?

The site has no analytics. No tracking. No third-party scripts of any kind whatsover. By complete coincidence, the site is fast. Funny that.

For the styling of this web book, I tweaked the stylesheet I used for HTML5 For Web Designers. I updated it a little bit to use logical properties, some fluid typography and view transitions.

In the process of converting the book to HTML, I got reaquainted with what I had written almost seven years ago. It was kind of fun to approach it afresh. I think it stands up pretty darn well.

Ethan wrote about his feelings when he put two of his books online, illustrated by that amazing photo that always gives me the feels:

I’ll miss those days, but I’m just glad these books are still here. They’re just different than they used to be. I suppose I am too.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making your website work offline, have a read of Going Offline. Enjoy!