Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

Data is currently dislocated – our narratives and metaphors around it try to convince us it is immaterial

Organic, Local, Artisan Data Storage

Seventy years ago we dreamed up links that would allow us to create two-way, contextual conversations. Why don't we use them on the web?

A Short History of Bi-Directional Links

A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web

A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

A history of our metaphorical understanding of the web

Metaphors We Web By

How to build a digital garden without touching code

Digital Gardening for Non-Technical Folks

The lost permissioning and copyright system of the Web

Transclusion and Transcopyright Dreams

Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project

The Pattern Language of Project Xanadu

How block-based interfaces can help us create more structured data on the web

The Block-Paved Path to Structured Data

An illustrated diagram exposing the inner layers of the dark and cozy web

The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web

Notes on how to use the position property in CSS to make scrollytelling stories

Positioning Elements & Scrollytelling in CSS

Collecting people I know who work at the intersection of design and engineering, in an attempt to figure out what a design engineer is

A Collection of Design Engineers

A few favourite books from the field of digital anthropology

A Digital Anthropology Reading List

Exploring ways to build social infrastructure around books and reading on the open web

Interoperable Personal Libraries and Ad Hoc Reading Groups

Notes from my podcast episode Open Source and Gift Economies on Maintainers Anonymous

A Chat with Henry Zhu on OSS & Gift Economies

What we lose when our digital notes remove the freedom to move

The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps

Notes on pattern languages and Christopher Alexander's legacy on software programming

Pattern Languages in Programming and Interface Design

Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web

Ambient Co-presence

Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they've been over the course of an exploratory journey

Historical Trails

Adding spatial affordances to the experience of browsing the web

The Web

Essays, notes, and patterns related to The Web