today's leftovers
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Blake Watson ☛ Building our own private Discord knockoff
Matt and I bounced around a few apps, but the latest one was Discord. We love its UI. But we don’t love that it doesn’t offer much privacy. I recently saw this video that levels some pretty big accusations against Discord. Specifically, the idea that the Chinese government has access to our data by way of Tencent, the China-based company that invests in Discord.
I didn’t do much to fact-check that accusation but it’s not like believing that big companies are harvesting data and sharing it with governments is a tin-foil-hat-level idea.
We were inspired by home-cooked apps and small web ideas. It’s fine to make your own thing just for you. And you can absolutely build software without pulling in a ton of dependencies and wiring up complex infrastructure. We’re so used to reading about the software practices of large companies that it’s easy to forget that a lot of (most?) software projects don’t need to be built at that scale.
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Murtuzaali Surti ☛ Chrome 121 Broke My CSS By Adopting New Scrollbar Properties
Recently, in version 121, Chrome started supporting standardized CSS scrollbar properties scrollbar-color and scrollbar-width mentioned in the CSS specification and it broke my CSS. Here's what happened and how I fixed it.
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Open Access/Content
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Trevor Morris ☛ The Loss of Links Continues
It has been a year since I wrote about the loss of links on the web and wrote a script to analyse broken outgoing links on my website. Throughout the year I check on outgoing links using my on this day page – familiarising myself with content from the past and marking broken links as I go.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Remembering Cat Doctors
Cat Doctors was one of the first projects that I used Typekit on. Typekit (now Adobe Fonts) was one of the first subscription services that provided its subscribers to access to a large library of fonts. It opened up a whole new world for Web design that we take for granted today. I had just bought my subscription a couple of weeks earlier.
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