The Chip Bag

The Yesterweb postmortem is a mess

Anyone who has been in "small web" spaces has probably heard of the Yesterweb. It seemed like everyone was in their webring (some people still have the defunct widget up, even), and supposedly they were very active in proseltyzing on social media because there's a cutesy infographic page on their website.

I thought the Yesterweb was really annoying, and I didn't agree with what they were on about. Ultimately, though, I thought they were just a harmless clique that I happened to find obnoxious, so I didn't really care.

When I saw they shut down and left a very long postmortem to remember them by, I decided to give the thing a read because I was expecting silly petty internet drama. I love internet drama! And then I ended up getting significantly more than I had mentally prepared myself for. The following is more or less a text version of a stupid Youtube reaction video, so sorry* if you were expecting an eloquent takedown or something.

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Improving my life by putting things on a metal cart

A few years ago, I got one of those carts everyone and their mom seems to have. I don't use it as a cart 99% of the time, but it's easier to move around than a shelf if I do need to move it. I recently got the impulse to consolidate most of my art supplies onto it for easy access, so I am here to share the results of that organization with you, the audience.

Long shot of the art cart

I got the cart on sale from a Store that sells Containers, but pretty much everyone is selling them nowadays. I didn't bedazzle or accessorize my cart at all, but there are also a bunch of different attachments and other junk you can hang off of your cart for maximum organization. Or you can just be like me and stuff everything in there regardless of whether it wants to be stuffed.

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Not traveling with my Traveler's Notebook

I bought a Traveler's Notebook cover last year, mainly because they released an olive edition and I needed it. I liked the idea of a modular notebook, though, so I swore I would figure out how to use it. I continued liking the idea and doing absolutely nothing else with it for 6 months. But it's a new year with a corresponding new me, so here I am! Using it!

I will freely admit to dropping about 50 bucks on the cover and having no regrets about it at all, but a lot of the other stuff that Traveler's Company sells is overpriced. Some of their accessories are fine things that someone less frugal would probably be happy with, but others are garbage. I don't want to play roulette with garbage, so I've hacked together the stuff I have inside my notebook with some success.

Traveler's notebook, closedTraveler's notebook, viewed from the side
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Every image gallery sucks (except mine)

Image gallery frameworks! They're everywhere! And yet I haven't found even one that doesn't suck. They're clunky at best and inaccessible at worst.

Here is a sampler of issues I've encountered on various image galleries:

  • Requires Javascript to work (clunky, inaccessible)
  • Doesn't have alt text (inaccessible)
  • Lightboxes (clunky, usually inaccessible, probably requires Javascript)
  • Just a bunch of thumbnails that link to image files (inaccessible)
  • Images open in a tooltip (worse than lightboxes in every conceivable way)

There must be a better way. Right???

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