Maciej Ceglowski, who runs Pinboard, writes essays and talks on web bloat, technology criticism, history, and AI worries.
Commenters call him an outstanding writer whose essays are always worth reading, and often single out the Website Obesity Crisis talk.
HTML5. Read Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into HTML5. And by read, I mean, both the material, and view-source and his stylesheets. The site itself is a tour de force of what he describes.
CSS2 and CSS3. The latter is where CSS headed, though it's still in development.
You can do a hell of a lot of sensible page design with just straight HTML5 and some modest amounts of CSS.
Javascript for any automation.
CodePen is a great place to play with (and explore for) ideas. StackExchange and Reddit's /r/WebDev and other subs for Q&A with other developers.
Maciej Cegłowski's rants on current Web faults / advertising / privacy http://idlewords.com/
There are others who hit this point, and do it well, but Maciej makes a compelling case on all three points (with essays featured here on Hacker News). My read is that the Web is headed for a crisis on the point of design, on many grounds (readability, privacy, annoyances, accessibility), and that, despite much of what I've written above, read Web design may well die. With "Reader Mode" features being included in more browsers these days (Safari, Firefox, Chrome is coming up with it, Opera's had it, not sure about MSIE), readers can simply opt out of design. Which may be a Good Thing.
Enjoy.
I've been been a Pinboard fan for years. I paid $11 for lifetime access back in 2011, and "upgraded" to an annual plan with archival in 2021 (mostly because I wanted to support the continued development of Pinboard, and that the time Marciej mentioned new features that were supposedly coming). I love Maciej's work, writing[0], and general vibe. Pinboard acquiring del.icio.us[1] after Yahoo drove it into the ground is one of the most delicious (pardon the pun) acquisition stories in tech history I think. I also enjoyed his micro-incubator thing[2] (I think he was giving grants of $50 or something).
Unfortunately over the past several years it just feels like he's gotten burnt out on Pinboard and has stopped developing and is barely supporting it. I guess that's fine if everything works properly, but I don't really have a lot of confidence in the future of Pinboard anymore. I personally haven't had any actual problems with Pinboard yet, but have read several accounts by others who have and have found support poor to non-existent.
[0]: https://idlewords.com/
[1]: https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/
[2]: https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/01/pinboard_co_prosperity_winners/
Similarly from Notes From An Emergency [1] by Maciej Cegłowski:
"It's not clear that anyone can secure large data collections over time. The asymmetry between offense and defense may be too great. If defense at scale is possible, the only way to do it is by pouring millions of dollars into hiring the best people to defend it. Data breaches at the highest levels have shown us that the threats are real and ongoing. And for every breach we know about, there are many silent ones that we won't learn about for years.
A successful defense, however, just increases the risk. Pile up enough treasure behind the castle walls and you'll eventually attract someone who can climb them. The feudal system makes the Internet more brittle, ensuring that when a breach finally comes, it will be disastrous."
[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/notes_from_an_emergency.htm
It's all of the above, integrated with a maximum latency for each tier level. Not a new protocol, but adopting the best of the best, like QUIC over UDP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_support
Apple is a vertically integrated company, so the idea is that a mobile carrier/ISP could help ensure the middle trunk from server to client arrive in a timely fashion. Often that involves good QoS and limiting streaming to 720p. But there are a lot of other things that can be done to limit slow page loading. For example, I tried loading Reuters on a slow data connection, and it took much longer than BBC. https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
It's funny how now most people seem to know Maciej Cegłowski as "the creator of Pinboard." His blog, Idle Words [1] is one of the best I know of. I would even say that the piece about Scott and scurvy [2] was the most interesting thing I read on the Internet in the last few years.
So, I am very happy about Pinboard.in being successful, but I think it's a bit of a shame that such frivolous endeavors take Maciej's time from writing his blog :P
(A bit more seriously, it's really nice to find a compatriot doing something cool in more than one domain.)
[1] http://www.idlewords.com/
[2] http://www.idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
Assuming that you're the same idlewords who wrote this [0] blog post in 2005:
It's funny - as someone seemingly a little bit younger than you, I'm pretty sure your top recommendation, The Master & Margarita, did replace Kundera, at least in my experience.
(which - no disrespect to Bulgakov and tongue planted in cheek - is a shame, because Kundera's better!)
I like Murakami, but I think he'd make for a poor "sexually-transmitted book". Most women I know would treat a line-up of his work on a shelf as a bit of a red flag, actually.
[0] https://idlewords.com/2005/11/dating_without_kundera.htm