Over on Notist I’m using the PHP League CommonMark Markdown parser to convert Markdown to HTML.

One recommendation that Google’s Lighthouse audits recommend is that rel="noopener" be added to any external links. There’s an entire article explaining why this is a positive move for both security and performance.

I initially couldn’t figure out how best to do this, but it turns out it’s really simple. CommonMark enables you to specify and register custom renderers and they even have an example of one for adding a class to external links. All I needed to do was slightly...

We’ve all heard the podcast ads for Audible. I listen a lot of podcasts when I’m out running, driving back and forth from the airport, or just around the house cooking or washing up. I’m doing a lot of long runs at the moment and am running out of episodes for the podcasts I subscribe to, so I thought I’d sign up and give Audible a try.

I’ve listened to audiobooks in the past, but mostly purchased as one-offs from iTunes. This would be my first time committing to a subscription service, but I was game to give it...

There exists a whole class of web sites for being “your home for x” as-a-service, where x is something you’ve created and want to share with others. If it’s code, there’s GitHub. For photos, you have Instagram and poor old moth-eaten Flickr. Music goes on Soundcloud, and if you’re the active type you can share workouts on Strava.

If you ever do any public speaking, you will have information from your presentation you’d like to make available afterwards. If you speak fairly regularly, you might want to keep an upcoming schedule of future engagements, and an archive of past conferences.

To...

In a world before social media, a lot of online communities existed around blog comments. The particular community I was part of – web standards – was all built up around the personal websites of those involved.

As social media sites gained traction, those communities moved away from blog commenting systems. Instead of reacting to a post underneath the post, most people will now react with a URL someplace else. That might be a tweet, a Reddit post, a Facebook emission, basically anywhere that combines an audience with the ability to comment on a URL.

UnderConsideration, the force behind some of the best and longest running digital publications on design, organizers of amazing conferences, and fellow Austin residents have pulled stakes to move to Bloomington, Indiana. That's right, some incredibly creative, entrepreneurial, smart people just left one of the hottest cities in North America for a small town in Indiana, the type that was recently the subject of parody on television.

Armin Vit (co-founder of UnderConsideration) provided some rationale for this seemingly-crazy relocation.

As an Austin resident of six years I find myself nodding in agreement, especially at the last bit about the airport. Austin Bergstrom was one of the most chill airports in the country and now it's just as stressful as Oakland on a Monday morning—every day. I knew Austin was going to blow up, but I had no idea it would scale so big, so quickly. And it's still growing like crazy. The city and surrounding area is set to double in size in the next twenty years.

I don't know that Kitchen Storey and I could move to the middle-middle of the country, but we're certainly starting to consider that it's time to move back to the Pacific Time Zone. Airport lines be dammed.

Roughly fifteen years to the day, I published the fourth blog post on Airbag. It was a quick reaction to an exciting game Super Bowl between the St. Louis Rams and the New England Patriots. The Rams mounted a last-minute comeback that was surely going to force the game into overtime, but with one minute and thirty seconds on the clock, Tom Brady drove the team within field goal range, and the Patriots added three points to their scorecard and one the game.

The year was 2002, and everyone was still trying to process 9/11 and the aftermath--we were still processing shock. Due to national security concerns, the NFL season was pushed by a week while the country considered what security precautions were necessary for events like football games were potential future attacks could occur. Thus, the Super Bowl XXXVI was the first NFL game to be played in February.

At the time we were collectively looking over our shoulder for another round, the next wave of attacks, all while trying to get back to routines. Before the Super Bowl, there was special news coverage on security--demonstrations of tactics and a showcase of equipment to be used to thwart any attacks. This was especially true for the upcoming Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. There seemed to be just as many news stories about security as there were stories about athletes and the games themselves. You had to wonder if this was going to be the new normal.

I can't recall the last time I read or watched a story about event security. And I don't remember the last time I heard what security color we're on. It's yellow or "Elevated Condition." Thankfully, I had to look it up.

One of the necessary evils of running a website that includes user comments is eventually sifting through spam. Even if you have a good anti-spam filter like Akismet in place, you still need to occasionally wade through the comments to check for false positives.

Today, I’ve been updating the Perch Blog add-on to make it compatible with the upcoming Perch 3, and one of the pages I’ve been tackling is comments listing page. The listings API in Perch 3 has the option of including a Gravatar alongside any email address column. On adding this to my comments...

Dustin Senos, former Head of Design for Medium, and all around good guy came up with a pretty cool idea after a bit of introspection.

Looking back at my early career I too had a handful of supportive mentors during school and at work (I could use one now come to think of it). More recently, I have enjoyed building up and continuing to mentor nearly one-hundred early career designers, developers, and offering managers at IBM Studios around the world.

Inspired by his career reflection, Dustin came up with Holiday Office Hours—a way to give back by arranging eight hours of time in thirty minute blocks over the holiday break to provide consultation for "people who may be in school, getting into the industry, new to design or engineering, or struggling with their first tech job."

Once I caught what Dustin was up to and why I joined up along with Noah and a growing list of industry professionals.

So, as long as you don't work for IBM (because you all already know how to find and schedule my time), sign up for a time slot and lets talk*. I'm happy to answer any questions you have and give what advice I might have after being in the industry for twenty-plus years.

* I removed the link because all slots have been taken. Given the response I'm going to consider doing this again soon, but after I get through the initial round of sixteen discussions. Follow this account and @brilliantcrank for future