Make Haste Slowly

24 Jun, 2026

Pinch me. John Gruber, providing commentary on my last post:

It’s bad enough to include 161 third-party trackers on a website. But it’s downright dystopic to declare your 161 third-party “partners” under the heading “We Care About Your Privacy”. That’s like beating someone in the head with a baseball bat while telling them “We care about your skull”, literally adding insult to injury.

Also John Gruber:

So, what would you do if Steve Jobs was quoted in a viral blog post saying, “We think «Your Name Here»’s post is very insightful and not negative”? I decided to just sit there with a smug look on my face for a few days (which, arguably, isn’t all that different from what I do most days) and pretend that it was no big deal. I didn’t link to it or mention it on Daring Fireball, and as far as I can tell, I didn’t even tweet it.

I’ve been thinking about how to acknowledge that my writing has appeared on Daring Fireball — one of the biggest, and certainly one of the very best, weblogs of all time. As excited as I was to see my name on his website, my initial reaction was to play it cool. At most, I’d retweet @daringfireball if it made it there. Alas, that bot has been broken (in a justified form of protest) since 2024. But then I recalled that, in the blog post after the one quoted above, John remembered that he did, in fact, acknowledge Steve Jobs’ comment about Daring Fireball. So, here I am, doing the same.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have my writing featured on Daring Fireball, and I couldn’t let this moment pass without thanking John for sharing it. My complaint about The Observer’s dickover is now, by far, my most popular post of all time, and will likely remain as such for a long time yet.¹ If my legacy becomes that of a doctor who spent some of his free time railing against dickovers, then so be it. They’re a scourge upon the modern Web, and they deserve nothing but a swift and ruthless demise. They can join other abandoned and worthless Web trends and technologies, like Flash, and JavaScript as a whole, for all I care.²

But that wasn’t the real reason for this post. I wrote this post because I need to give credit where credit’s due.

Depending on when you read this, you might notice that Daring Fireball has a new slogan: “Make haste slowly”. Search online, and you’ll learn that it’s a reference to Textism, a weblog by the late Dean Allen. One that appears to have been a massive influence on Daring Fireball. Reading through some of the archived pages of Textism, you get a sense of how awesome this blog must’ve been in its heyday, and how extraordinary Dean was. As a former event photographer, I quite enjoyed this post. I wrote an email to John, thanking him for helping me discover Textism.

I concluded that email with an unrelated postscript about a ridiculous dickover I’d seen the other day, and the rest is history.