Eric Portis
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ericportis.com
Eric Portis
@ericportis.com
1.4K followers 280 following 350 posts
Web developer; used-to-be-a-printmaker; Let’s Share What We Know
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ericportis.com
tfw you've been awarded the National Basketball Association's inaugural Web Standards prize
A low-res photo of Bruce's face crudely photoshopped onto the famous photo of Michael Jordan crying on the NBA championship trophy
December 17, 2025 at 11:46 PM
ericportis.com
Ah, I should have specified, this is the alt text used in the article that the photo was published in, on VanityFair.com! @erikahall.bsky.social’s alt here on Bluesky is great.
A screenshot of the website where the photo was taken open in a browser. The devtools are open, and the alt text on the <img> element in the "Elements" tab is circled.
December 17, 2025 at 10:51 PM
ericportis.com
(everybody* loves auto-sizes though)

—
* 98.4%
A screenshot of the <img sizes=auto> results, with the negative results hovered, revealing a tooltip reading, "76 respondents (1.6%) had a Negative sentiment."
December 16, 2025 at 11:30 PM
ericportis.com
Oh just validating my priors and thinking about essential vs inessential complexity whilst reading through the State of HTML `srcset` + `sizes` survey comments
Three responses are screenshotted. They say, "Awfully confusing syntax", "I never get these numbers right first time. Really hard to pick for truly responsive pages e.g. where the image size flexes with the page width." and "i still need to read the docs everytime I need to use this feature, the API is not intuitive at all"
December 16, 2025 at 11:30 PM
ericportis.com
This is horrific for all of the obvious structurally-racist bias perpetuation reasons and also: way too detailed/specific? Haven't these people read Understanding Comics??
A panel from Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics". A series of faces lines the top, going from a photograph of a man's face (captioned "one"), through progressively cartoony illustrations of that face (captioned—"a few"—"thousands"—and "millions"), to a circle face with two dot eyes and a line for a mouth (captioned "nearly all"). Narrator Scott says, "Another is the Universality of cartoon imagery. The more cartoony a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe."
December 9, 2025 at 4:10 PM
ericportis.com
well that's gonna have to be a custom www.oreo.com/oreoid ... with uhhhh the dancing baby on it? maybe?
3D dancing baby, from the 90s meme. The baby is dancing.
December 9, 2025 at 3:55 PM
ericportis.com
MFW the img is :borken
Still of The Sweedish Chef (the muppet), behind a table with various cooking implements, mouth agape, steam coming out of his ears
November 5, 2025 at 7:57 PM
ericportis.com
For one thing, captures the experience of being on the other side of an argument with a motivated implementer, uh, quite well.
Screenshot of a paragraph from the article. It reads, "I pushed back and proposed alternatives and compromised and proposed alternatives and pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and pushed back and finally gave up; and those were only my attempts to push back. Others also pushed back and pushed back and asked for a pause and pushed back and pushed back and recanted their earlier support and pushed back and asked for a pause and asked for a pause and pushed back." Every action described in the paragraph (e.g., "pushed back", "asked for a pause") is a hyperlink, linking to the discussion in question.
October 2, 2025 at 3:24 PM
ericportis.com
I believe I am in one of the farthest cities from OKC in the lower forty eight but ——— no tolls!
Google maps showing 1d 6h drive time between Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and Bellingham, Washington
September 17, 2025 at 5:08 AM
ericportis.com
Three and a half gallons of prunes. We did what we could 🫡
Six large jars and one medium jar of prunes on a kitchen table. There are some lovely dahlias in the background.
September 16, 2025 at 10:54 PM
ericportis.com
oh that's a differ—hey wait a minute
Giant printed tarp above a vendor's stall with giant photos of various fried foods Zooming in on "Zak's Zucchini" which is very fried Zooming all the way in on the words "ZAKS ZUCCHINI"
September 5, 2025 at 4:27 PM
ericportis.com
look i don't know what y'all are doing over there but we have some truly fantastic children's food art and you are: not invited. sometimes a <del>cigar</del><ins>zucchini</ins> is just a <del>cigar</del><ins>penguin</ins>.
A green cabbage turned into a head (kinda like a snowman's head), with grapes for mouth, potatoes for ears, berries for eyes, and something orange as a nose A bell pepper cut in half and filled with cherry tomatoes with faces drawn on them in sharpie. They all sit on a paper plate that's been colored blue with a crayon. In kid's writing the plate also says "BOAT BOAT" A real potato turned into Mr Potato Head. Googly plastic eyes, carrot nose, apple-slice-mouth, cucumber ears, and amazing broccoli hair. A zucchini artfully carved into a penguin! White parts of the penguin are skinned. Slices peeled up for wings. The stem of the zuke is the penguin's nose.
September 5, 2025 at 4:19 PM
ericportis.com
We're hiding the last of our giants behind a plant.

(I think yours might be bigger!)
A 30" zucchini propped up in a corner on a shelf, behind a tall houseplant.
September 5, 2025 at 2:39 PM
ericportis.com
Ah that's better
Screenshot of the updated blog post, showing off syntax highlighting
August 17, 2025 at 4:54 PM
ericportis.com
view from mt constitution... holding my phone up to some binoculars.... we're pretty sure we can confirm. like mostly sure. 99.9%.
View through some binoculars. There's a big black circle with a sunset landscape in it. Some hazy islands and water in the foreground, the sky behind them goes from red to orange to yellow to blue in the back. And what's that... just barely... is it a mountain? in the haze? Maybe!
August 12, 2025 at 4:46 AM
ericportis.com
what a clear and unambiguous reference point
Cropped image of the international date line snaking through the pacific. It's kind of wiggly but there is a large sideways T shape that comes out of the "western" half, meaning there are large sections of the "eastern" half that are both east of the main body of the western half, but also west of the top bar of the T.
August 8, 2025 at 3:28 PM
ericportis.com
I said it, I meant it, get hyped, pre-orders open next week (August 12). piccalil.li/javascript-f...
Screenshot of a quote from my dumb face. "A lot of folks in tech spend their careers build enormous (and enormously intimidating) walls of complexity. Mat's made his career out of smashing those walls: breaking 'em down with clarity and concision and making sure everything he puts into the world is inclusive, approachable, and, frankly – fun."
August 7, 2025 at 6:23 PM
ericportis.com
Wife: “hey the antiques store down the street posted a cool-looking print the other day, we should go check it out”; we did; bought it; turns out it’s from americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stor...; I'm geeking out; she's got the *best* eye
A print on paper. A 4x4 grid of square three-color botanical designs takes up the top half. The bottom half is a calligraph-ied recipe for YOGHOURT CREPES. The recipe is kinda hard to read; I'll note it involves cognac.
July 28, 2025 at 3:12 AM
ericportis.com
Update: we made it home (although little buddy did completely retract into their shell, which— understandable.)
A snail on the side of a car, completely retracted into their shell
July 9, 2025 at 8:27 PM
ericportis.com
Hey there little buddy… let’s ride 😎
A snail on the side of a car in a parking lot.
July 9, 2025 at 7:59 PM
ericportis.com
so slight. so tiny! teeny, really.
A screenshot from the piece. "We asked for the slightest of changes, to just cover sports, sports related issues, as well as sports adjacent stories. That was preceived as beyond the pale by the legacy team and as such they left en masse."
July 2, 2025 at 6:21 PM
ericportis.com
brb forming a new political party
An illustration of a flag. Upon the flag is a pint glass of fizzy water, with a superscript numeral 2 next to it. Beneath it is the contents of the footnote, "2: COME AND TAKE THEM"
July 1, 2025 at 4:24 PM
ericportis.com
A stock illustration, heavily watermarked "Adobe iStock". In stately, comosed serifs and soft, heartfelt script, it wishes, "Our deepest condolences to you and your family" in light shining type on a dark navy blue background. A stock photograph of several people, weirdly all wearing business casual in a work setting? It is heavily watermarked "alamy". One man (sad) sits centrally, facing the camera, head down, hands clasped, making eye contact with no one. Four colleagues lean in attentively - two physically touching the sad man, holding his shoulder and... bicep. All seem concerned. One is offering what one presumes are condolences. They sit in front of a blank whiteboard.
June 23, 2025 at 5:00 PM
ericportis.com
I know it's the insufferable minimalist millennial in me but sometimes I wonder how much of chatgpt’s appeal is just: lack of clutter.
ChatGPT's answer to the question "What are the best beaches in Sicily". We can see the number one beach, "San Vitro Lo Campo", which is apparently "Famous for its soft white sand and turquoise waters", but mostly what we see is whitespace, stark/minimal sans-serif type on white, no ads, nothing but words. A Conde Nast article about the best beaches in Sicily, scrolled down a bit. It's all ads (and UI) ads bigger than the screen, ads cropped awkwardly, ads that contain other cropped ads? Conde Nast article about beaches again. Now there's a popup call to action modal asking me to subscribe to their newsletter to receive two free gifts, with a bigass picture of a tote.
June 3, 2025 at 5:59 PM
ericportis.com
Works as expected! codepen.io/eeeps/projec... 000708258.codepen.website
May 30, 2025 at 8:40 PM