WDRL — Edition 266: Hope in a dark forest, Reduced Motion, Truncating Text with CSS, a Docker dev setup, and Being Tired.

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Hey,

Last week I read about the web being and becoming more and more a dark forest. This made me thinking and I can’t get around that there’s hope in the dark forest. Let’s stay positive on how we can contribute to make the web a better place, stick to the principle of the invididual being able to create an impact with little actions. Whether it’s you adding Webmentions, you removing tracking scripts to a website, you who recycles plastic, you who picks the trash from the street to throw it into a bin, or you who cycles instead of driving a car this week to work. We all can make things better for ourselves, for our minds and for people around us. We just have to do it.

News

• Firefox 67 is out now and brings Dark Mode CSS Media Query, WebRender and Side-by-Side Profiles so you can run multiple instances easily in parallel, enhanced Privacy Controls against cryptominers and fingerprinting. It now also supports AV1 on Windows, Linux, and macOS for videos, String.prototype.matchAll() and dynamic imports.

Generic

• How to be that annoying client who ignores your knowledge and gets creative on their own. By a developer who experienced it himself dozens of times and now found himself in the same position having ordered a fine drink and then messed it up. Seeing ourselves in the perspective of a client.

Tooling

• Pascal Landau wrote up a step by step tutorial on how to build a Docker development setup for PHP projects, and yes it contains probably really everything you need. It’s very in-depth in order to avoid writing a tutorial with only half of the instructions where many people will struggle applying it to their own projects afterwards.

Security

• Many services handle DDoS protection for you these days. But how would you build it on your own? It’s certainly possible, as this (a bit dated but still applicable) article shows.

Privacy

• The people from WebKit are very active at developing new clever solutions to protect users without compromising too much on usability and the interests of publishers and vendors. Now they introduce Privacy preserving ad click attribution for the web, a technique that protects users’ privacy by limiting the data sent to third-parties but still provides useful attribution metrics for advertisers.

Accessibility

• Brad Frost describes a great way to reduce motion of e.g. animated gif pictures on websites using the picture element and its media-query feature.

CSS

• The CSS feature for truncating multi-line text has been implemented in Firefox in the vendor prefixed version -webkit-line-clamp: 3; which then truncates text at the end of line three.

Work & Life

• Leo Babauta on a method to realise and acknowledge when you’re tired. It’s hard to accept but we’re humans and no machines, so there are times where we feel tired and our batteries are low. The best way to recover is realising that this is happening right now and then focus on it to regain some energy.
• Many of us are hunting down how to achieve some minutes or hours a day of ‘deep work’. Fadeke Adegbuyi from Doist wrote The Complete Guide to Deep Work, sort of an online book, including a step-by-step checklist.

Go beyond…

• Everybody loves them, many have them: AirPods. Yet, they’re an environmental disaster, as this article shows.
• The North Face tricking Wikipedia is advertising's dark side.
• This is an interesting guide and look-up resource to understand the individual impact on climate change based on the food we eat. This is not about going vegan or so but how changing eating habits can make a difference, both to the environment and our own health.

If you like what I do here, you can contribute with your money.

—Anselm