Transcription of my talk for the MK Geek Night meet-up. Sharing my personal reflections on how, after years of chasing IndieWeb perfection, I just accepted my imperfect website

Sidney Paget illustration of Sherlock Holmes from Strand Magazine, December 1892, p.646, but I added papers from his March 1893 (p.281 of Strand Magazine) illustration and then two versions of the W3C logo to the front page. When performing a WCAG evaluation (or review or audit), it’s easy to get…

First, I want to apologize to the participants of the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG) at W3C, as this blog post will …

Protest against the Omarchy/Omacom Foundation and the tech companies and executives funding far-right open source.

To decide whether to visit a page, people take into account how much relevant information they are likely to find on that page relative to the effort involved in extracting that info.

It's kind of wild that we're still organising knowledge like it's sitting in a 1970s filing cabinet. People and AI don't think in folders. They find information through search, context and connections.

Substack is convenient, but treat it as a distribution tool for your content. Your content should live on an independently owned website, which has a domain name you control and own. This way, you …

Everything this page knows about you, it learned in under two seconds. Without a cookie, a permission prompt, or a click.

“The capacity to face an open universe. Physically open, psychically open. No doors shut.”

My final research project looked at the barriers that sighted practitioners face when authoring non-visual data experiences. We co-designed, built tooling, built a UI prototype, and ran a study.

It is by no means the gravest linguistic crime of the React epoch, but 'state management' grates like nails on chalkboard. The most popular tools in this space simply do not manage state, they merely propagate it; React very much included. This leads to confusion and low-quality products. Thankfully, better alternatives exist. They all add the dimension of time, and we can distinguish more useful tools by how they handle conflicts.

Reading is the art of attention.

Patterns for exploring.

Why AI depends on the foundation accessible design systems build — and how "AI will fix accessibility" is producing the opposite outcome at industry scale.

What happens next? Well, you tell me.

$3,690 raised of $90,000 goal 4.1% funded Campaign ends August 1, 2026 at 00:00 -0700 59 days 08 hours 59 minutes 10 seconds Campaign closed

I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here. A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone…

Exploring cyberspace with a thumbstick.

The personal site & portfolio of creative web developer Henry from Online

Designing with mustard is the future of design. I used to think it was ketchup, but I was wrong. If you're not currently designing with mustard, you should get out of design and tech. The future of design is mustard. Adapt or perish.

Why styling on semantics and roles could make accessibility harder to skip

Talk with your face.

It is completely acceptable to reject modern AI entirely on selfish grounds. Here I offer a 3-part mini-manifesto focused on why, entirely for yourself, you should consider rejecting generative AI.

The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. A visual essay about what actually persists.

Being open and transparent is a radical strength, not a weakness.

A better way to build web sites. Fast, flexible, and built to last.

A practical guide to naming design tokens, including token tiers, common conventions, and rules that keep systems consistent and scalable.

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

We inherited our product processes from a 19th-century steel works. Frederick Winslow Taylor separated thinking from doing, managers from makers, designers from builders – and a hundred years later, most digital product teams are still running on that model. The gap between design and engineering isn’t an accident. It was designed in. And it can be designed out.

On quitting, the spread of AI, and the loss of an ideal.

A proposal for browsers to offer a per-site color scheme control.

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.