Vale.Rocks Posts
Declan Chidlow — Web developer and writer
Long form writings about assorted topics.
vale.rocks/postsDeclan Chidlow writes about whatever he's thinking about — accessibility advocacy, AI criticism, Neovim configuration, unicycling, nootropics, game reviews — with the conviction that a personal blog should actually be personal. Posts range from carefully argued essays on why you can't opt out of accessibility to strongly worded rants about open-source licensing, all written with a directness that makes the range feel cohesive rather than scattered.
Written by Declan Chidlow.
Regular
Publishes weekly or bi-weekly
4
Independent Blog
English
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Beauty in DVD Menus
Look at many early DVD releases, and you’ll see interactive menus touted as a selling point. Coming from VHS (or LaserDisc), which had no menus to speak of, this was a genuine improvement. That isn’t to say all DVDs had interactive menus, however. Many of the earliest releases just entered straight into their content, and the same is true of some cheaper releases. However, once DVD became widespread, publishers started to really embrace the capabilities the format afforded them. The...
Speaker Rider
A rider is a term used by performers and production teams for a document listing demands and requests for their performance. Famously, the band Van Halen would include a clause in their rider requesting a bowl of M&M’s with the brown dragées removed as a way to check that the document had been comprehensively read. This is my rider for speaking at events, such as conferences and meetups. It is a reasonable set of expectations that, for the most part, is expected by any speaker – not...
Examining My Team Fortress Statistics
Team Fortress 2 is a great game. It is also a deeply unserious one. I’m not sure how much value can be extracted from the gameplay statistics of an online multiplayer experience where it is not uncommon to killbind for a laugh or to decide not to kill anyone for an entire match and instead chill with the enemy. Team Fortress 2 is a deeply unserious game with a deeply unserious community. Nevertheless, this page presents my stats for Team Fortress 2, Valve’s 2007 class-based multiplay...
CSS Curiosities of the Past
The ebbs and flows of the web have gotten us to where we stand today. We simply wouldn’t have the web we do without the journey it has taken us to get here. However, some of the steps it has taken to get here have been interesting to say the least. CSS is how we style things on the web, but since its inception it has been made, on occasion, to wear a few more hats. It has taken on odd roles and picked up behaviours it probably ought not to have. Such is life. As I’ve detailed odd and...
My HTML Boilerplate
When HTML was first created, a document could be very simple indeed. A valid document could look like this: <TITLE>HTML document</TITLE> <H1>Heading</H1> <P>This is a paragraph with a <A HREF="https://example.com/">link</A>. It wasn’t until HTML 2.0 – the first formalised standard – that a proper document structure came into being. A DOCTYPE declaration to explain a document’s type and to handle compatibility became an...
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