I recently had a conversation where the topic of discussion was a giant house spider. One person had spent their night chasing it around and finally trapped it under a trash can, only for the spider to escape by morning. Lamentation about the spider becoming a permanent member of the household ensued.
Wait, the giant house spider has the word "house" in its name. That's weird...
It's nice to think our homes are sterile boxes distinct from "outside," with the exception of the occasional unwanted intruder. If you find something from the outside in your house, you're probably going to kill it. Maybe you'll take it outside because you think that's the more humane route. Both actions are missing the point. The point: There are lots of animals (most of them spineless) whose "natural" habitat is now human settlements.
All the "old web revival" and "nostalgia" rhetoric that's prevalent in the small web world these days has come with a healthy dose of not giving a shit about responsiveness or, at minimum, making sure your website is functional on all screen sizes. People in the 90s and 00s didn't have to design for phones, so why should I? Phones are evil! I hate phones!
Regardless of how you feel about smartphones, they're not going anywhere. Sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending we live in the pre-smartphone era is futile. Get over yourself and accept that your website needs to work on phones.
From an economic standpoint, smartphones are cheaper than computers, and they're much more versatile tools. A phone can call people, it's portable, and it can connect to the internet without wifi (not to mention smartphones are virtually mandatory for living in modern society). The sheer breadth of apps available on smartphones nowadays also allows people to do a lot of stuff that previously only possible on a computer. Having both a computer and a smartphone is a luxury not afforded to many people; if you only have the money for one device, you're going to buy a phone. (If you try to pull out the "poor people buying iPhones" argument, I am going to throw you into lava.)
To be mobile-hostile is to be ableist as well: A series of surveys among disabled people found that a large majority (84% in 2015-2016) of the respondents use smartphones. Touchscreens require less motor engagement to use than a keyboard and mouse. You also don't need to sit up at a desk to use a phone, so people with chronic pain or illness or otherwise reduced motor function can still complete tasks when they're in bed or on the couch. Many disabled people also use their phone as an accessibility tool in of itself (e.g. blind people can use their phone to help them with directions, taking photos, or identifying objects; you can get AAC apps on tablets instead of buying a dedicated device). There are lots of helpful and easy to use settings for browsing the internet like screen readers, haptics, dictation, global text resizing, color/contrast adjustment, autocomplete... and your phone can come with you everywhere. Once again, if you only have money for one electronic device, you're getting the phone.
And some people who own both a computer and phone still prefer to do their internet browsing on their phone. This is perfectly fine. Complaining about people enjoying using their phones makes you sound like a boomer in 2013.
Even if you think too few people visit your page to make designing for mobile worth your time, the optics of being "mobile hostile" are pretty terrible. By posting a giant sign on your homepage about how you hate phones and you'll never make your website usable on a phone, you are indicating to viewers that you lack the social maturity to consider people who have different habits, needs, or preferences than you. More succinctly, you're effectively telling mobile users that you don't think they deserve to use your website. This makes you look like a petulant asshole at best and aggressively classist and ableist at worst.
I don't care about how good you are (or think you are) at coding webpages if you can't be bothered to make your page work on a phone. The counterargument there might be that, well, you are bad at coding webpages! Look, I even have a cutesy self-deprecating message on my website talking about how bad I am at coding webpages, so it's fine!
But that's bullshit. Making a responsive website is no harder than making a nonresponsive one. I would argue that making a shitty website that doesn't even work on my monitor resolution (let alone a phone) is harder than just making the thing responsive to begin with. If every element on your website is meticulously sized down to the pixel and uses position:absolute to go where it needs to be, you are making your life ridiculously hard. No wonder you think you suck at coding! And if your website isn't held together with duct tape, it will be much easier than you think to retrofit it for mobile.
I used to have a tutorial here, but it wasn't very good, so I'm working on rewriting it. For now, use Google. If you really don't feel up to it, copy my code. Send me an email. Make an attempt to be better and take that stupid "no phones" button off your website! I am begging you to stop making me read the sentence "This website does not work on mobile" in the year of our lord Jesus Christ 2022202320242025 2026. Please.
I made some needleminders with some unused enamel pins (from Fossil Forager) I had lying around. This is entirely as simple as it sounds: you pull the pointy part off and superglue a magnet on. If you're working with a magnetic pin, you'll have to stick magnets to both sides to stick a needle onto the front. (Not great for aesthetics, but I don't care about that!)
I don't have much use for pins, but the magnets don't compromise wearability, so you could still use pins that you've converted in this way. If anything, the magnets are probably beneficial since neodymium magnets are ludicrously sticky.
I found this recipe for pecan pie brownies on the Times last week. It was a journey filled with many trials and tribulations and I ended up having to make them twice, but at the end of it I had some damn good brownies. I modified the recipe for my own purposes, and now I share it with you because stealing from the NYT is always morally correct!
