The blog | All about Ken Hawkins

28 Oct 2025

Introducing a "Work" section

A home for evidence-led impact stories documenting measurable outcomes from my work on platforms, performance, and design systems.

23 Sep 2025

The power of the pause: How planning beats prompt tuning

Traditional project planning techniques help ensure maximal benefits from AI tools.

19 Sep 2025

A stop-gap Drupal module to kill Word Junk in CKEditor 5

A tiny CKEditor 5 plugin for Drupal that strips inline Word-like junk in one click.

14 Sep 2025

Individualism is the flavor AI chatbots can't stomach

The AI experience has drained traffic from reference content, but leaves a path forward of human-centric experiences, interactivity, and better on-site value.

12 Sep 2025

Sacrificing knowledge in the name of data

The goal is not more data, but data to facilitate the story of what we're trying to achieve.

7 Sep 2025

Predictable, token-based filenames with Eleventy Image

How I swapped Eleventy Image’s hashed outputs for readable, stable names — and the trade‑offs.

6 Sep 2025 | Note post

Exposing HTML: The No-JS nudist CSS toggle

A tiny footer checkbox to turns your site styles off with no JavaScript required.

5 Sep 2025 | Note post

Go-go-go … I missed EmbedPDF

It seems a robust, embeddable PDF viewer for on‑page reading already exists.

4 Sep 2025 | Note post

Recursion: it’s fonts all the way down

I’ve moved from Now Alt to Recursive, an open‑source variable font that unifies UI text and code with one flexible file.

31 Aug 2025

A simpler, faster site: moving to pure Eleventy v3

I upgraded the site to Eleventy v3, removed Gulp and the Visual Framework, and simplified everything.

11 Aug 2025

Making PDFs more viewable

Because ‘Just give them the PDF’ isn’t good enough.

10 Jul 2025

Drupal delayed by Azure MySQL

Managed Azure Database for MySQL cost us 50%–80% slow down. After six months of pain, we moved our Drupal 10 site back to a classic VM and halved our page‑load times.

8 May 2025