Jim Nielsen

Designer, developer, blogger.

Lover of food and websites.

Icon-noisseur https://www.iosicongallery.com

Publisher of feeds. You should subscribe.

Blog: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com
Notes: https://notes.jim-nielsen.com
Website: https://www.jim-nielsen.com
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jim-nielsen.com

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Last Notes

2026-02-04 16:11:10 GMT

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right on.
i kinda said this, but i really do believe it: arguing for customer benefits is so much harder than arguing organizational benefits.
when you have a leader who hears an argument on behalf of customers and immediately gets it — “yeah, let’s do it” — that’s such a different place to be than a leader who hears an argument on behalf of customers and asks for proof — “show me the data”

2026-02-04 14:12:28 GMT

📝 Restraint is becoming the only scarce thing left, which means saying “no” is more valuable than ever.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/saying-no/

2026-01-24 15:25:12 GMT

If you're looking for something to blog about, I loved this style of post (from @npub14mk…qfs5) where you just post about stuff you did but didn't "ship".
I mean, who doesn't love the outtakes at the end of a movie?
https://anhvn.com/posts/2025/outtakes-etc/

2025-12-21 17:32:05 GMT

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I really wanted to see Moana 2 cause I liked the first, but my wife and kids went without me and came back saying it was bad and I shouldn’t waste me time lol — so I haven’t even seen it yet! Already behind

2025-12-21 16:30:31 GMT

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studio logic:
let isPopular = makeMovie()
while(isPopular)
// sequels
isPopular = makeMovie();
// no more sequels?
makeRemake();

2025-12-10 19:12:03 GMT

I've felt this desire to migrate all my personal sites off of relying on 3rd-party CI and to, instead, make all "build" steps happen on my laptop. Then merely push the resulting files to my host (Netlify).
Plus the holidays are approaching.
I feel the gravity of this black hole project sucking me in.
Send help.

2025-12-08 05:21:15 GMT

📝 I'm a curmudgeon for doing menu items without icons (unless you can give a good reason to include them).
And apparently Apple used to recommend the opposite of what they now do in Tahoe.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/

2025-09-18 22:47:23 GMT

📝 I'm all existential over here after reading @npub1387…vefs’s article, like what does it even mean to be a “browser” anymore?
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/rip-browsers/

2025-09-03 17:52:52 GMT

The visual representation of social links from @npub1qgg…0ptl's website are on point 🎯
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/141/638/128/101/547/original/b625895fd5a126c7.png

2025-08-25 15:55:17 GMT

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https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/090/214/965/075/953/original/c5bbdc2f0b9a300d.mp4

2025-08-25 15:43:32 GMT

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honestly, i have no idea. I've never been able to fully wrap my head around naval navigation lol

2025-08-25 15:11:06 GMT

Approaches to direction in CSS
Good (physical properties)
top:
left:
right:
bottom:
Better (logical properties)
block-start:
inline-start:
inline-end:
block-end:
Best (maritime properties)
fore:
port:
starboard:
aft:

2025-08-23 15:00:38 GMT

AI in business: the process by which the communications of one person are transferred to another person without passing through the head of either.

2025-08-14 22:07:39 GMT

Trying to tell my son about how, in my day, if you wanted to play Age of Empires in LAN mode, you could just connect computers together without an internet connection or the "latest update" to the game.
I don't think he can comprehend this.
Especially since it seems every other time we want to play, we have to download a 300MB update in steam first

2025-08-14 16:32:57 GMT

Your friends and loved ones might forget to reach out to you on your birthday...
But your credit union, realtor, and dentist never will!

2025-08-04 05:06:14 GMT

📝 Do you know how these will resolve?
```
<a href="">…</a>
<a href=".">…</a>
<a href="?">…</a>
```
Come on a journey with me
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/href-value-possibilities/

2025-07-29 19:53:10 GMT

lol future job postings will be like:
Position: Front-end developer
Salary: $120,000-$150,000
AI agent allotment spend: $30,000-$50,000

2025-07-24 21:39:03 GMT

I’m kind of fascinated by this trend to stick icons on everything just to make it more visually interesting.
My 5y/o showed me this bag of beef jerky and, based solely on what was communicated to him via icons, said “Dad, this has wind and ham in it.”
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/910/372/737/454/346/original/1197be9effc93125.jpeg

2025-07-20 02:39:32 GMT

I vote we replace
“if you don’t pay for the product, you are the product”
with this one
“The only free cheese is in the mousetrap”
https://mastodon.education/@bryanalexandee/114864908664557375

2025-07-18 15:10:27 GMT

webdev pitches in 2025
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/874/870/871/702/159/original/0fb1a12fc9b7324c.png

2025-06-12 19:53:52 GMT

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new captchas just dropped
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/672/141/606/512/625/original/86720b63b053b508.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/672/141/882/511/702/original/1f534df501201178.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/672/142/141/196/196/original/6a63811a54742a86.png

2025-05-20 14:19:04 GMT

Kids are playing “school” downstairs. Oldest just declared that the classes would be:
- Math
- Gym
- Socialist Studies

2025-05-19 00:42:31 GMT

5y/o broke a handle on the door and got locked in his room. He got a note, wrote a message and slid it under the door. It read:
inedtoo
wgitawtuuh
ir
(i need to get outta here)
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/531/719/444/564/244/original/9ed6de8bc1fbc656.jpeg

2025-05-09 20:17:10 GMT

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today i learned...
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/479/715/252/879/003/original/a135143faa5c15c8.png

2025-05-09 20:07:44 GMT

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Full-stack Diveloper

2025-05-09 18:44:37 GMT

Alex makes a good point:
If we gave HTML buttons the ability to POST, PUT, DELETE, etc., that might encourage folks who don't really care about semantic HTML to actually use semantic HTML, because now you can do something with a <button> that you can't do with a <div>.
Sure you can still make clicking on a <div> do a PUT on click with some JS, but you know what would be even easier than wiring that all up? <button method="PUT">
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inRB6ull5WQ&t=826s

2025-05-01 05:32:10 GMT

Judge to Tim Cook:
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/430/936/718/318/432/original/f0a1e537063e177b.jpeg

2025-04-30 16:31:26 GMT

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don't tell VC-funded web tools they don't pivot. that's their speciality!

2025-04-29 15:38:36 GMT

📝 I find it ironic that the web platform has such a strong ethos of "no breaking changes” but the tools we use to build on top of the web are like "BREAKING CHANGE ALL THE THINGS”
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/backwards-compat-in-web-but-not-its-tools/

2025-04-22 19:26:59 GMT

Front-end, a day in the life:
- clone a repo
- [npm/pnpm/yarn/etc] install
- watch a stream of warnings go flying by
- disregard them all without reading a single one

2025-04-02 20:29:13 GMT

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ha no wasn't you. but yeah, i'm assuming they were probably running it like a blog post with various titles — we'll have multiple job titles and see which one performs best for drawing in the right candidate (as people are likely looking for/connecting to different job titles)

2025-04-02 18:58:04 GMT

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My theory is they're all the same job, they're just trying to draw in different kinds of people…

2025-04-02 18:57:27 GMT

I just saw a company with these three separate jobs all under the "Engineering" department:
- Design Engineer
- Product Engineer
- Engineer Who Can Design

2025-03-18 05:21:33 GMT

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i've always really liked continuum. his austin city limits performance circa this era was pretty great. good mix of jazz/blues/rock. the live version of "gravity” that ends it is a good one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntlpOOnr2zY

2025-03-04 14:35:19 GMT

📝 How I build websites with LLMS
(Sorry in advance for the baited headline)
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/lots-of-little-html-pages/

2025-03-03 18:25:58 GMT

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lol what? You couldn’t make this stuff up. But AI could ha

2025-02-14 20:19:29 GMT

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me too!
feels like so many things like this get noticed and filed, then just end up categorized as "not important enough for anyone's time compared to BIG NEW SHINY FEATURE”

2025-02-14 20:09:13 GMT

New job title:
"Roaming UI Papercut Fixer”
Your full time job is continually use the product and fix (small) broken things.
If anybody finds something broken, they file a bug and put it in your backlog. Then you just chew through it (+ things you find).
Given how broken so many UIs are, it feels like if you kept a running log of every single fix you made, you’d easily justify your position…
And don't even dare ask me how small UI fixes improve the bottom line. This is for human sanity.

2025-02-10 15:31:03 GMT

📝The talk “Creativity cannot be computed” from @npub1fqn…7965 got me thinking about the art of making websites.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/the-art-of-making-websites/

2025-02-03 16:59:33 GMT

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brb, renaming my github PR for this work…

2025-02-03 16:27:28 GMT

What's the german word for when you go to redesign a very specific piece of your blog, but then over time it just turns into a redesign of everything and now every page on your site requires a review in order to ship this small change you started out with?
Happens a lot, seems like there must be a word for it…

2025-01-31 20:05:22 GMT

I submit to you the following candidate for "internet comment of all internet comments".
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/924/762/423/364/309/original/9d26cbe443e5a9e4.png

2025-01-27 17:28:46 GMT

📝 I got HTML minification setup (yet again) and finally made a note to self on how to do it the inevitable next time.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/html-minification/

2025-01-14 16:44:59 GMT

Love this alternative icon you can choose in the Bear app
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/827/715/163/228/311/original/a17b3d6362637264.png

2025-01-11 04:46:24 GMT

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one of my fav memes. think about it often when i'm in my car.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/807/902/655/339/583/original/9589de58374f9673.png

2025-01-11 04:44:17 GMT

And fridges.
And ovens.
And car dashboards.
And…
https://mastodon.davepeck.org/@davepeck/113801180544560167

2025-01-06 19:06:31 GMT

I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with `git push`
But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer.
I'm sick of devops'ing stupid stuff because builds work on my machine and I have to spend that extra bit of time to ensure they also work on remote linux computers.
Not sure I need the infrastructure of giant teams working together for making a small personal website.

2025-01-05 06:31:27 GMT

📝 You can subscribe to my blog via email now, but you shouldn’t. One day the emails may just stop coming. I would recommend RSS instead.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/subscribe-via-email-now/

2025-01-02 20:39:47 GMT

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nothing contributes to shareholder value in the long run, like not thinking about shareholder value

2024-12-29 02:30:45 GMT

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I don’t buy books in an airport, but if I saw one titled “Feels like this shit used to be easier” on a shelf, I’d be tempted…

2024-12-09 16:18:29 GMT

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curious: which one did you get? do you remember?

2024-12-09 04:46:43 GMT

📝 While they were perhaps originally intended to visually summarize the content of an article (or at least tease it), many social share images are merely billboards on the information superhighway: space to try and capture a click.
I blogged about making my little game which pokes a little fun.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/omgimg/

2024-11-10 23:20:39 GMT

My toxic trait is I like to complete personal projects to about 98% and then “let it sit” before shipping, just to make sure I feel good about it.
But then I never come back to it and never ship it.
Or if I do come back to it, I can’t remember what stood in the way of shipping and so I don’t know how to finish it.

2024-11-04 17:07:24 GMT

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1px jump, you got it!
But now I’m wondering if how you pronounce GIF is more important…

2024-11-04 16:14:07 GMT

📝 Quick post with two gifs for screening future employer relationships #designEngineering
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/design-engineer-job-screener/

2024-10-23 14:26:19 GMT

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really enjoyed this piece and the striking differences across countries/cultures in the posture towards force and violence.
TY for sharing.

2024-10-23 06:07:10 GMT

📝 Calling the web “lowest common denominator” is a good thing if you value reach
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/lowest-common-denominator/

2024-10-22 22:30:22 GMT

Always be hustlin’ and promoting your blog.
See me, I'm crafting the following response to the attached SMS message I received today.
—
Nice try, but I've tried parsing URLs before and know what the public suffix list is. Perhaps you've seen my article on the nuances of a domain? Check it out.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/domain-nuance/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/353/439/181/980/302/original/c11a0c7f7fdb6579.png

2024-10-16 16:49:37 GMT

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Dave, I know you've been wanting to write a book…
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/318/125/447/400/021/original/dd462c5d52d325a9.png

2024-10-02 20:40:59 GMT

If you haven't seen it yet, this is pretty cool.
I mean, can you imagine some corporate entity owning the trademark for "HTTP” or “HTML" or "CSS”? That'd be absurd.
Time to free JavaScript
https://javascript.tm

2024-10-02 13:37:57 GMT

📝 Creating on a personal website pushes you to look inward, whereas creating on a social platform pushes you to look outward.
The medium shapes the message.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/person-in-personal-website/

2024-09-21 18:19:48 GMT

From the notes:
I think you could argue that a strict data-driven mindset actually encourages the suppression of novelty, because there’s no data for the novel.
https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/#2024-09-21T1221

2024-09-18 16:56:11 GMT

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i probably should've been more clear when i spouted off my opinions ha, but I do think a mere “~15 min read" info tidbit in the byline is _way_ better than some widget that tracks me down the page counting down the time.
but for me personally, i would still rather see word count than reading time. maybe it's because seeing "reading time" has always made me feel like an inferior reader because I never get it read in the time stated ha.

2024-09-18 14:26:19 GMT

Long story short: I just bought a Switch (first game console in our home).
So that means the long-awaited Switch 2 should get announced any day now.
For everyone that’s been waiting, you’re welcome.

2024-09-18 14:04:46 GMT

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BYORTW (bring your own reading time widget ha) seems WAY more useful and personal to me than the site owner implementing one that dictates what the reading time will be for every single user who ever visits their site ever

2024-09-18 04:53:31 GMT

📝 Opinion:
When you put a reading time estimation widget on your content, I take that as an admission of so many things — including that you favor expediency over quality.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/reading-time-estimation-widgets/

2024-09-11 13:45:26 GMT

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precisely. This absurd notion that every post needs an image is built into the tools which further perpetuates the idea

2024-09-10 22:39:27 GMT

The greatest travesty to happen to the internet in the last decade was that everyone in the world who publishes any kind of written content feels the need to create a “featured" (social share) image.

2024-09-03 05:19:48 GMT

📝 I like to build websites by clicking around a lot.
You can call it “QA”, where I purposefully try to break weak points.
But I like a woodworking metaphor more. I feel for rough edges and sand them down, giving myself splinters instead of others.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/sanding-ui/

2024-08-20 18:49:23 GMT

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is state the new treat instead of cookies now?

2024-08-19 05:13:47 GMT

📝 Social posts die with the passage of time, whereas blog posts gain life from it!
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2024/blog-vs-social-posts/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/986/975/319/662/654/original/ef62b89614caff85.jpeg

2024-08-12 14:31:26 GMT

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ha nope, always love a blog post quoting a blog post!

2024-08-12 13:52:18 GMT

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idk if you’ve seen this, been Vince Vaughn gave a kind of parallel insight about the movie industry
https://www.threads.net/@carnage4life/post/C-Q8PLFhw3o/?xmt=AQGztDbmPjA2CUk10NRnpf_XjrdrxUSVMcMsOe7s9Uheig

2024-08-12 13:47:44 GMT

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quite enjoyed this one.
> The issue is that novelty, by definition, doesn’t have a track record, which means that you can’t predict how it’ll go, but given the nature of the economy we live in, odds are that it will not make enough money to pay for itself.
Never really thought of it this way, but it makes me think that a headstrong, data-informed mindset actually encourages the suppression of novelty (which is so prevalent in tech)

2024-08-09 15:59:16 GMT

Ha, remembering that time I had my picture of myself on my home page and (as an easter egg) your cursor turned into a pencil when you hovered my image and you could draw on my face.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/932/889/996/749/491/original/a2745471a7186e66.mp4

2024-08-05 17:15:12 GMT

Small scale farming, e.g. gardening, is fun but industrial scale sucks all the fun out.
Similarly, small scale making websites is fun, but industrial scale sucks all the fun out.