Happy 2026, programs! As this is the first Links For You for the year, I figure it may be good to remind folks why I write these. Social media can be a great place to share links with folks, but it's very much hit or miss. Someone may share something incredibly cool that you would love to boost, but if you miss it, you're out of luck. I subscribe to many listservs that share good tech links, but a while ago I thought it would be cool to share and promote links I thought were especially cool. Obviously that's pretty opinionated, but that's why you're here, right? Each of these posts will have three links, typically but not always tech related, and a fourth entry that is 100% just for fun. Enjoy!

The price of URL parameters

First up is a fascinating look at how innocuous URL parameters can have an adverse effect on performance: Fixing the URL params performance penalty. Barry Pollard (from the Google devrel team) discusses how URL parameters, even those that don't change the output of a site, can impact the performance of a web page. Even cooler, he talks about a proposed solution to the problem.

Relative Time via Web Components

Yall know I love web components, and next up is a cool one from GitHub called relative-time-element. This makes use of Intl to display dates relatively, i.e. so and so days from now. (You can check out my post on it here.) Here's an example of how it looks:

<relative-time datetime="2026-01-01T16:30:00-08:00">
    January 1, 2026 4:30pm 
</relative-time>

Which today renders: last week. For earlier times it will render something like on December 1, 2025, with the proper formatting for the user's locale. There's a bunch of different attributes and it's actually used by GitHub itself on the main site. If you want to play quickly with it, I've embedded a CodePen below:

See the Pen Untitled by Raymond Camden (@cfjedimaster) on CodePen.

My only suggestion here is that you should probably always use the title attribute with this such that if the user hovers over the relative formatted time, they can also see the "real" date.

Embedding CanIUse

Next up is a cool little utility to embed CanIUse data on your web page: CanIUse Embed. You drop in the script tag and then add a data attribute to a paragraph tag. Here's an example:

<p class="ciu-embed" 
data-feature="mdn-javascript_builtins_intl_relativetimeformat" 
data-past="5" data-future="3"></p>

Figuring out that value for feature was a bit hard, but if you go the docs, they've got a nice little helper there to make that easier. You can see an example of this below:

Just For Fun

Did you know this year is the 40th anniversary of "The Labyrinth"? Of course you did. Of course it also helps if your wife is a massive nerd and this is her favorite movie. Tomorrow night we're going to see it at the theater (for probably the third or fourth time since we've been together, which is just fine with me!) and this is probably the most fun song from the movie. Enjoy!