Published on 12 January 2026.
While I was writing “Publishing my citation preferences”, I consciously decided that the blog post should include a screenshot of the website feature described in the post – the new “Reference this post” section on my blog pages. I knew that I might change the design of the widget I designed in the future. If I did, how would that affect the readability of my blog post? I thought to myself.
By including a screenshot of the widget I had designed in my blog post, I knew that there would be a constant frame of reference for the reader. Even if the style of the page changed, the screenshot documents, at the point in time in which I wrote the blog post, how the widget …
Published on 12 January 2026.
While I was writing “Publishing my citation preferences”, I consciously decided that the blog post should include a screenshot of the website feature described in the post – the new “Reference this post” section on my blog pages. I knew that I might change the design of the widget I designed in the future. If I did, how would that affect the readability of my blog post? I thought to myself.
By including a screenshot of the widget I had designed in my blog post, I knew that there would be a constant frame of reference for the reader. Even if the style of the page changed, the screenshot documents, at the point in time in which I wrote the blog post, how the widget appeared.
Now that I reflect on this more, I think adding screenshots as I go will consciously become a feature of my web design and development writing in the future.
On the topic of screenshots, I also like to take screenshots of designs as I make new things. This is helpful for the same reason as screenshots in my blog posts are. Every screenshot is a frame of reference. If I am playing around in a HTML document – or in the Firefox developer tools – and like something I made, I can screenshot it for later if I want to keep experimenting without having to copy my code into a new document.
I have a folder full of design screenshots through which I sometimes skim, not looking for anything in particular but perhaps with the knowledge deep down that every screenshot is a memory of a project at a point in time.
For example, one I don’t think I wrote about explicitly but screenshotted nonetheless was the feature of my blog search engine that translates Taylor Swift song acronyms – commonly used on Reddit, and a topic about which I wrote a blog post – to their full song names.
This feature doesn’t fully work right now; I haven’t touched the logic behind it in many months. But, the screenshot I saved documents the potential, and is a memory of the moment of joy I had when I got the code to work in the way I wanted:
ALT
A search result for the query "what is dwoht" which returns the result Dancing with Our Hands Tied.