This month, finding your own space on the web, exploring the magic and quirks and possibilities of CSS, and (re)discovering community.
Current Status: Working on a redesign. Some big news soon. Thinking about adding statuses to the top of these things every month.
Find Your Corner (On the Web)
Continuing a theme I’ve been seeing more and more, Parimal Satyal explores the personal website and what he calls the small web in Rediscovering the Small Web. It is not only a compelling case for creating one’s own website (with a couple of free resources), but it’s one of the more in-depth explorations of the evolution of the web as a creative space and democratizing medium that I’ve seen. And if you are going to create your own website, why not add it to The Whimsical Club. Need another reason to start your own website (or blog)? Leticia Portella has several.
A CSS Showcase
In the spirit of Dave Shea’s CSS Zen Garden, Stephanie Eckles has put together a CSS challenge for the modern day, Style Stage. The rules are simple. The HTML stays the same. You get to create the CSS. The possibilities are endless, and beautiful.
It’s incredible what people are able to do with CSS which is, in some ways, a language with some quirks. Chris Lilley, a technical director at the W3C, walks through the history of CSS to pick out some of those quirks, and how they came to be. Ask an expert: Why is CSS . . . the way it is?
What Community Means
For people on the web, the communities that they get to be a part of are the most meaningful in their lives. For Joe Simpson Jr, he credits his community for saving his life. Simpson tells his heartfelt story of personal tragedy, and the way the WordPress community and his work in it allowed him to heal.
Un-Consolidation
It’s no secret that the web space has consolidated in the past decade or so. We now turn to one search engine, one retailer. Behemoth tech companies have come to define the web today, and they often feel inescapable. But the web is an open platform, and there are signs that that is changing. Writing in Marker, David Freedman hones in on Shopify, which is attempting to takedown Amazon through a network of independent retailers.
