GCS
GCS
Yes! The risks of using 3rd party URL shorteners outweighs any perceived benefit.
web
umami.is
umami.isI'm trying out umami for visitor stats on my site and so far it's easy to install (yay, Docker all the things!) and looks great.
conradakunga.com
conradakunga.com"So today I set out to actually see what it is one agrees to when they accept all."Peeling back the layers on those cookie agreement dialogs helps us learn about how web advertising works (and how massive the industry is).
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi"Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works."Good reminder that web design can fail without accessibility.
Ferns
Ferns"But if folks make more money off of customers when they reduce latency, there has to be some power in increasing latency."This is a hack I can get behind. If you can't slow down the velocity of information on social networks at least you can physically slow down the social networks on the piece of the network you control.
jeffhuang.comThe web is becoming more and more ephemeral.
"Vanished are amazing pieces of writing on kuro5hin about tech culture, and a collection of mathematical puzzles and their associated discussion by academics that my father introduced me to; gone are Woodman's Reverse Engineering tutorials from my high school years, where I first tasted the feeling of dominance over software; even my most recent bookmark, a series of posts on Google+ exposing usb-c chargers' non-compliance with the specification, disappeared."This article includes some steps you can take that could help preserve what you publish. Complex frameworks, walled-gardens, and serverless publishing trade away endurance for convenience.
The Guardian
Wow, this is some awful antisocial behavior from a company (and marketing firm) that should know better. Can we have one or two ad-free spaces?
Twilio
These security and perfomance changes for websites are easy to add and include some new browser features I wasn't aware of before. I went with the recommendation here for a simple CSP header but it looks like you could really batten down the https hatches with that one if you read through the spec.
forbes.com 
"The decentralized web is a mindset and a belief in an alternative structure that can address some of the afflictions that have risen from data pollution."This article raises more questions than it answers but it’s a good summary of why some of us prefer decentralized web tools and recreation. Re-decentralization feels like a lost fight but I’m glad people are working on it.
Eric BaileyThe current state of accessibility in web design is not good even though awareness is up and related development tools are becoming more available. Eric Baily does a nice job here of summarizing a recent WebAIM analysis of the top million home pages and putting it in context. One thing I learned is that Firefox added a new accessibility pane for developers: Accessibility Inspector. It's very handy to be able to get color contrast info with a click and I hope the ease of use and ubiquity of tools like this will help developers make more accessible choices.
crawshaw.ioThis post resonated on many levels, especially: "Today you have to choke your way through the money-making miasma to find the joy." I agree that a separate search engine would be nice but automatically differentiating indie content from sponsored content seems like an impossible task. Maybe more human curation of the web is the answer. (Said by a human who likes to curate the web.)
sidebar.io
Welcome to Newsletter Wednesday! (I just made that up so it's a thing now.) Sidebar shares five daily links about web design and it's a good one to subscribe to via email. I've recently been diving down a microcopy best practices rabbit hole and I'm blaming Sidebar for that.