My Writings, but filtered for Articles
Welcome to my writing place. You will find articles, notes and annotated links here and can subscribe to their feed once or individually.
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as article I’m on vacation and today I worked for two hours. Yesterday for one. Before that, some minutes per day perhaps, mostly nothing. I plan to do nothing again over the next days but can’t promise. How about you — do you know the feeling of overwhelming work when you come back from vacation? Do you feel exhausted right after the first day back in office? That’s what is common to me and I want to avoid … -
as article One year ago I purchased a VW T5 van with the goal of transforming the van into a camping car for my own adventures. Now I found the time to write up what I did and show you how. First of all, let me say I’m really thankful to my dad and to my best friend who both advised me so much with useful insights and tips and my dad for showing me how to manufacture the wooden interior properly. In summary …Building a custom <strong>VW Camping Car</strong>—DIY style
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as article You can use the new display: flow-root value today. It’s available in Firefox 53 and Chrome 58 which both have been released this week. And thanks to @supports , we can easily apply it already. Visit Demo on JSBin directly . Native “clearfix” Rachel Andrew has a good introductory article on the new native method to fix containers with floats inside. The new display value has only recently been …Using <code>flow-root</code> today
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as article Yesterday, the Brexit negotiations started and they are as populistic as we already would expect it from UK’s new leader Theresa May—in the end she lurked to the EU that she would exit from Europol as well if negotiations are not reaching an acceptable agreement for them. As observable already in the past few months, the British leadership is aiming to obey existing rules for an exit of a member …Brexit Negotiations, Europol And The Fear Of Missing Big Data
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as article At some point during building a new web project we will define a browser support matrix. But if we’re honest, how do we usually define this list? Developers tend to add their bias regarding old, or browsers that don’t support all modern code standards. Other people in a project prefer to look into the current web server statistics and base their decision on these numbers. Both approaches are not …<strong>The World</strong> uses the Internet (differently)
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as article On Twitter, we like to discuss the latest technologies and ideas like how to integrate CSS the best way into our web app stacks using ES6 modules. One after another ES7 feature is being pushed into browsers, and yet we tend to forget what the majority of developers need. It’s due to us living in this tiny bubble called Social Media—channels not everyone is following. When we look at what has been …The Divergence of Developers — Think out of the Box
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as article Let’s talk about vacation and time-off from your day to day job. I’m not a perfect example myself but in the last seven years working as a freelancer I’ve gotten some ideas about what my body expects from me, what my brain expects and how I need to force myself to take vacation. Some things I learned the harder way . It’s Geek Mental Health Week again but this post is not limited to “Geeks” or …Enough Vacation — An Individual Goal
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as article First of all, I’m not going to dismiss the huge performance benefits and research concepts of AMP here. There’s a more important story here to look at: Link rot. Yesterday, I read about a story where an artist lost his entire work when Google switched off the old Blogger platform. This threw thousands of blogs into nirvana. Google announced this, but the key problem remains: If the domain itself …How <strong>AMP supercharges link rot</strong>
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as article Since quite some time I wondered why Apple’s News Bot hehaves so agressively on WDRL’s site. It creates about 20-40000 requests to my server each day. This week I finally found the reason due to this article . AppleNewsBot is incompatible with Let’s Encrypt certificates and gets more agressive when detecting that it can’t fetch the data. Apparently, this issue has been reported to Apple already …If you use <strong>Let’s Encrypt and have Apple News Bot</strong>, act now
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as article Many developers might ask why I would use a VPN or Tor network. Besides some of these networks being able to protect your privacy, they offer developers a huge other feature: Slowness and different locations to test your application and website. Check a CDN’s Cache If you use a CDN to serve your assets, you sometimes need to purge / invalidate the cache for a file. But most CDNs don’t do this …Using <strong>VPN and Tor for Web Development</strong>
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as article The key in getting the problem of data-farming by global companies right, is to make people understand what is happening right now. It’s not about Facebook and Google here — we’re right in the middle of a whole generation that is unable to cope with the topic of privacy. With the super-fast growing world of digitalisation and artificial intelligence, users cannot grasp the impact of it to our …<strong>The Responsibility Mindset</strong> With Artificial Intelligence
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as article Recently, Service Workers made quite some noise and people encourage to use this very newest technology on every website. But when I looked at the implementation and specification, I ended up having more questions than answers to it. Note: This post is not a rant about Service Workers. I believe they are a great technology and help us as developers creating better services. This is just an …Open Service Worker Questions
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as article I often hear from developers that they use Cloudflare to secure their sites. The service acts as a CDN and DDoS protection and offers free HTTPS for your website. The only thing you need to do is moving your domain’s DNS servers to Cloudflare’s. But this isn’t the whole truth. Note that this isn’t a particular problem of Cloudflare but a disclosure of a common misapprehension of their service. …Why You Should <strong>Choose Your Own HTTPS</strong>.
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as article With Firefox 43 we have the possibility to natively disable known trackers. With the new privacy protection mode you can do more than you think. An experiment worth trying. I’ve been experimenting quite a lot with Firefox’ new tracking protection recently. It revealed some quite interesting things about where we’re at in the web. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as you might think and here’s why. …See The <strong>Progress</strong>
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as article I recently researched font loading again as I wanted to use a local copy of a font and serve it as fast and smooth as possible. This is a quite different approach to when you use TypeKit or Google fonts and their simple copy/paste snippets… Over the past months there have been a few articles taking care of different font loading optimization techniques . Reading all of them, I ran into a few …<strong>Using Web Fonts</strong> The Best Way (in 2015).
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as article We all know the discussions about Apple’s Safari browser. And while the one party is saying “it’s the new Internet Explorer” , others counter state “it’s the user centric web”. I don’t fully agree with both parties. It’s the new IE Well, I can’t say that sentence is entirely wrong. With Apple’s engineers hiding all their development from the public and several occurrences where Apple invents …Safari isn’t the new IE but it’s also not user centric
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as article Today I switched my website from GitHub Pages and Cloudflare back to my own servers. It wasn’t that hard but there are also some drawbacks I want to report. Reasons for Switching It’s super easy to set up github pages and as they have ruby installed it’s even easier to run your Jekyll based site on it. You can also add custom domains to it which I did. At some point in the past years I wanted to …Performance is King but so is Privacy and Data Ownership
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as article Usually I am the one who says ‘Let the developer change every default browser behaviour’. Except, there are behaviours that, when customised, can hurt the user’s experience more than a custom behaviour could help. Such a case is custom scrolling. In the past week I visited a lot of different websites. Not the usual web development websites that I visit all the time but very different normal …Native Scrolling
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as article Lately, WDRL for me has not only been a way to curate and share the best links in web development but also a way to write things that are important for me. It’s a great feeling when I send out my thoughts on the list (usually in the introduction) and get heart-warming replies from my readers. What started out as a simple bullet point list on my blog now is a hand written letter with still some …A Channel To Write.
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as article It’s cool to be trendy and it’s cool to bash other people and products. Wait, what? It isn’t cool to harass people, it isn’t cool to fight with other persons. We need to be smarter in the ways we communicate with each other. Today showed it again . Addendum / Note: I’m not on either side in the following example. It just shows a hopefully neutral view on how different persons deal with others. …Don’t fight but start supporting each other