Grant Winney

Is there anything more satisfying than sharing knowledge? Of teaching someone and witnessing their "ah ha" moment? I usually write about tech, but no promises. I hope you find something interesting!

Articles of Grant Winney

Feb 13, 2020

How to make a dark theme for your blog that automatically adjusts for your visitors

Every time I learn some new piece of CSS I'm amazed at how flexible and powerful it is. Like how easy it is to tailor your site for your visitor's "dark mode" preference!...

internet historical

Jan 25, 2020

The Start of the Web

Over the years, servers moved around, systems were reformatted, files were lost... history became legend, legend became myth and for two and a half decades, the first page passed out of all knowledge until, when chance came in 2013, it was rehosted at its original domain. And there it remains......

privacy data amazon facebook linkedin reflection

Jan 21, 2020

Sharing is Caring

These days, it seems like the modern business's purpose, reduced to a single point, is to separate you from your data. And as it happens, I stumbled across several instances of data mining wrapped up as "features" just last week....

api rest requestbin tech carousel

Jan 05, 2020

How to deploy your own private RequestBin instance in under 5 minutes

If you need to consume a webhook from another service, or verify the payload being sent from your own REST API endpoint, RequestBin can help. It intercepts and displays the contents of any call made to it. Here's how to deploy your own private instance in just a few minutes....

api web browser tech

Dec 30, 2019

Why are websites requesting access to motion sensors... on my desktop?

I was checking the status of a FedEx order when Brave warned me that "this site has been blocked from accessing your motion sensors". I'm struggling to understand why a website would need that access. Do I get a different experience if I drop my device? Tip my monitor over? Spin the mouse around?...

so vault machine learning

Dec 29, 2019

SO Vault: Overwhelmed by Machine Learning - is there an ML101 book?

From the SO vault: "It seems like there are so many subfields linked to Machine Learning. Is there a book or a blog that gives an overview of those different fields and what each of them do, maybe how to get started, and what background knowledge is required?"...

ansible automation tech digitalocean

Dec 27, 2019

3 Ansible playbooks, 2 DO droplets, and a website... in a pear tree 🎄

Running through another of Erika's Ansible posts with example playbooks, creating a few pointless ones of my own, and discovering just how easy it is to deploy a website running on Apache!...

tech ethics ux design

Dec 23, 2019

Being aware of how sites reel you in... and hook you 🎣

I think most of us have a general sense of uneasiness with the firm grasp the most popular sites on the Internet have on us, but it's no mistake in design that they're popular... or that the cause of uneasiness is also the salve....

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