Red rubber stamp of a spark logo

From the Desk of Nick Simson handwritten in pencil

It was a mysterious beginning, full of potential —

On Eggs | Laurel Schwulst

A view of the mountains under a blue sky. A brick wall is covered with trumpet flowers and sagebrush

HTML isn't only for people working in the tech field. It's for everyone. Learn how to make a website from scratch in this beginner friendly web book.

HTML for People

The collection of food and drink emojis in Microsoft Teams, which look to be rendered in Play-Doh

various emoji come together to create the digits 404

Turquoise New Mexico license plate. The first three characters are RSS.

Plugin Inventory, 2023 &#8211; Nick Simson

I got tired of Lorem Ipsum text and created Quantum Lorem Ipsum, now with 100% more physics jargon!  To those who are not familiar, Lorem Ipsum is a piece of latin text, comprised of multiple paragraphs, that is used as a placeholder during the design process of building a page

Quantum Lorem Ipsum

https://neil.computer/notes/quantum-lorem-ipsum/

an assortment of objects on a windowsill: a miniature energy dome, a globe, a drawing of Charlie Parr, a glass sculpture, and a toy truck

Doing something new on my blog: a long-form post about type each day for the month of February. https://nicks.im/b/1E5

I recently got a little stamp made of my N.S. “spark” logo…

https://nicks.im/b/783

Thoroughly enjoyed this essay/talk by @laurel, on eggs in art and design.

https://laurelschwulst.com/e/on-eggs/

Finally moved in to our new place this week. This view from the backyard may be my favorite feature of the home.

I never met or corresponded with Molly Holzschlag, but her work and advocacy has had a profound impact on my career. I’m saddened to learn of her death, and touched reading the tributes being posted across the world wide web today..

This little free web book came out today (could not have arrived at a better time), and it looks amazing.

https://htmlforpeople.com

Build that website you’ve been thinking about.

Remote work is pretty amazing. I’m nearing  six months in to my first fully remote role (not counting my first couple years of the pandemic) and I’m feeling incredibly lucky I can work this way.

Do you keep track of books you are reading with an app like Goodreads, StoryGraph, Literal, etc? What do you think of rating books with star ratings (3/5 stars)? 

For me the only rating that matters is, do you recommend the book or not?

Once in a while I still see a great website design with a "Site by ..." link in the footer. Or a humans.txt file. Or both!

I love seeing these things, especially in 2023. The web is created by people, for people, and it's good to see those little reminders.

I'm working on a personal goal: to get better at public speaking. I'm currently writing and practicing a five minute talk, which I'll deliver next week as my first step on this journey.

Help~ Please intro me to some nice people? I have official channels to go through but I'd love to ~unofficially~ connect with folx working in government Design Systems/Accessibility ;) It doesn't matter which level (city/federal). As many countries as possible. Much appreciated!

Something about the updated Font Book in MacOS is not clicking with my brain. What should I be using instead?

Shout out to Microsoft Teams, for creating the most unappetizing cookie, pizza, taco, and other food emojis.

Thanks to WordPress, Hum, and iwantmyname, I now have a personal link shortener for my website.

Now I can do dumb stuff: like http://nicks.im/son redirects to my about page.

New license plate (not a vanity plate) arrived today. Maybe this is a sign I should blog more?

"A Day On, Not a Day Off"

It's a message I remember seeing on a sign at a MLK Day Parade years ago.

I wrote a little about being affected watching some sanitation workers who had to work on King's birthday some years ago: https://nicks.im/b/19e

I rented a car recently and the worker behind the counter recognized my email address was a personal domain name. We ended up chatting for a bit about web development and WordPress and even Netlify.

After switching my blog over to WordPress  several weeks ago, I decided to publish an inventory of all the plugins I’m running (it’s a lot).

https://nicks.im/b/tZ

Haven’t seen ‘Oppenheimer’ yet, but I have been using Quantum Lorem Ipsum a lot lately. https://neil.computer/notes/quantum-lorem-ipsum/

Playing around with Soft, a camera app in beta by Jake Dow-Smith. https://soft.camera/

A presentation I caught today reminded me that Custom Post Types were introduced in WordPress version 3.0 (June 2010). That was around the time I started using WP professionally.

What a release that was... https://nicks.im/b/749

Posts