Hey there! We're a quarter of the way through 2025 already, can you believe it? This weekend (May 3rd) I'll be in Rio de Janeiro trying to watch a free Lady Gaga concert in Copacabana beach. Fingers crossed I can actually see anything 🤞
For the Cool Links this month, we have a couple of "fun" ones, some web-dev related that were on my Read Later queue for a while, and some nuggets of wisdom on chaotic times.
Enjoy the reads!
Fun
This website simulates a TV schedule (with CRT-style filters!) with multiple channels, each featuring an interesting indie website. The programming changes often (just like shows on a tv channel), so it’s an interesting site to keep on your bookmarks and visit a few times a day.
The author here worries that so many people on Reddit are interacting with posters that are nothing more than robots, without any idea of that being the case. Even worse, some people are aware of that, but don't care.
I saw a comment in a brazilian forum that deeply resonated: “Maybe the biggest pain this realization causes is that, deep down, almost nobody cares about anything. We're the ones who are wrong for searching for meaning in environments dominated by chaos”.
Dev
Faster Rendering with the content-visibility CSS Property, by Umar Hansa
It’s like image lazy loading, but for page elements! I’ve got to try this out sometime and measure the effectiveness of this technique. Depending on the results, this might end up as its own blog post ;)
Cards, by Inclusive Components
Amazing step-by-step explanation on building Card components, with a special focus on accessibility. I love this kind of articles that explain the thinking behind every step and every line of code!
Card elements are everywhere and we all do them a bit differently. I’ll pay much more attention to the things mentioned here to ensure they’re as accessible as possible.
404s — gallery of error 404 page designs
This site collects all kinds of designs for 404 pages found in the wild. Pretty cool source for inspiration or to admire other people's creativity!
Misc
European alternatives for digital products
We rely too much on software companies nowadays, and most of the popular ones are USA-based. With the USA becoming increasingly less trustworthy on an almost daily basis, people have started gathering EU-based alternatives to the most popular services.
This is interesting even if you're not based in Europe, as companies there are forced to respect your data and privacy by law.
On TikTok, YouTube, X, and everywhere, “views” are a meaningless number, by David Pierce
Great article pointing out that “Views” are an useless metric and that the platforms that count it have zero incentive to not lie about them.
Wrapping up
Thanks for tuning in, and see you next month!
Did this blog post change your life? Or maybe I made a mistake that ruined your day? You can always send me an email to tell me about it.