I have a controversial opinion – the Federal government of the USA should have more power, and the local governments (state, city, other regions) should have less. This is my opinion as an American. As a European by birth, I think the same is true of the EU. My friends moved from England to Belgium when England was still part of the EU. They had to register with all the Belgian government’s myriad tax and other authorities. Social security was…
I have long been concerned about following web standards (and any others that apply to me) to ensure maximum accessibility for readers of my website (and others I maintain). I recently attended a brief training that covered the definition of accessibility. It’s wider than I realized. Accessibility can be defined in terms of people’s disabilities – something like “the product or service can be used regardless of a user’s disabilities” – but it’s better to define it more broadly as…
Recently I have been spending more time writing content for this website, and shortbooks.online. This has made me think about making websites in the early days. I started ‘blogging’ around 2002, long before platforms like WordPress, Blogger etc. became mainstream or particularly easy to use. I had FTP access to my website hosting, and I taught myself HTML (and later, CSS). Each post I wrote on my early blog was written directly in HTML, and I copied and pasted a…