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Under Construction

Building in public 👉 github repo / blog post

I bought a copy of Complete CSS from Picalli.li a few weeks ago, with the intention of upping my CSS game. It’s old territory for me, but my layout techniques pre-date flex… floats, clear fixes and IE hacks. Looking forward to learning some new techniques as I update the site.

Go beyond syntax expertise and reach a level of skill that’s usually only achieved after years of experience. Embrace a more efficient method of extremely maintainable, organised and flexible CSS, rooted in core skills with this expansive, inclusive course by Andy Bell.

It’s on sale at the moment, so worth going and picking up a copy if you’ve got that itch at all. He also has parity pricing, so helped with the weak dollar here.

Theme of Theseus

The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s Paradox, is a paradox and common thought experiment about whether an object (in the most common stating of the paradox, a ship) is the same object after having all of its original components replaced with others over time.

I’m playing around with ThemeSwitcher Pro from WebDevStudios. It’s an interesting approach to WordPress development that reminds me of the Ship of Thesus. It sort of upends the traditional theme as the base-unit of the site, allowing different parts of a site to run different portions of a theme.

For agencies and freelancers pitching theme development work, the plugin is potentially a game changer, as it allows you to start with a small budget, rebuild part of a site, establish a relationship and work towards rebuilding the whole ship. It could also lead to pure chaos if a project isn’t managed well.

I’m subscribing to the pure chaos approach, as this is a personal site. I’m also sort of curious if I can dig into the archives and make some 15+ year old themes work again.

Make your own website

Meant to post this article a year ago when I first read it, For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website.

This almost reads like me in my early teens:

Browsing the internet used to be a hobby of mine. Ever since my dad got us a modem when I was around ten, I spent hours at a time just looking at different websites. The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now, despite how many more people use the internet, I usually end up at the same three or four websites, and I end up a lot more bored.

Part of the appeal of the internet when I was young was making your own website. I taught myself HTML as a tween to facilitate that desire. Free web hosting on sites like Angelfire or Geocities was abundant, and you could waste an entire day just looking at the dumb things people put online. 

This year marked the 25th anniversary of starting a blog, then a few months later buying my first domain.

To celebrate the blog’s anniversary in May, I started a new theme, but never finished. Then considered working on it again around the domain anniversary in August, but never got around to it.

After a week or two of yak shaving (video example), I’ll activate my 90s style construction banner plugin and starting messing around again in public.

Colours: where did they go? An interesting look at colour grading in cinema over the last twenty years or so.

If you watch a lot of movies and TV shows, you might have noticed that over the last few decades everything has gotten a lot more … gray. No matter the kind of story being told, a sheen of cool blue or gray would wash over everything, muting the colors and providing an overall veneer of serious business.

Trinity College Dublin begins project to relocate vulnerable books

Three hundred years after the first foundation stone was laid, the 250,000 ancient books and manuscripts – including the ornately decorated ninth-century Book of Kells – printed on vellum, paper or silk are to be moved one by one, along with 500,000 others, to make way for the restoration of the building.

It is a monumental task that will take the best part of five years and cost €90m (£75m).

“Moving 750,000 vulnerable books is quite an undertaking, so we are having to pilot everything to see what is involved,” says TCD’s librarian and archivist Helen Shenton, who is leading the daunting project involving a 50-strong team.

Wordle seems to be the game of the moment on social media. This was my first attempt a few days ago. The last few times I’ve been using audio as my starting word (4/5 vowels)

Worth noting that the popular emoji shares are not accessible, not a great screen reader experience. If you’re posting results to twitter, it would be better to screenshot and use alt text.

Wordle board with four rows

One of my favourite albums for wandering around the city, doing workouts, etc., is All Day by Girl Talk. It’s a DJ mix sampling a huge variety of songs. Nice for those times when you don’t want any breaks between tracks, or have to think about what to play next.

Not sure if you can find it on streaming services, too many samples for licensing. But you can still grab a copy at Illegal Art.

A post every day in 2022?

I get lazy with my personal sites. A side-effect of working on the web most days. There’s a strong desire to disconnect.

But… I also open a lot of tabs.

In the past these tabs would’ve been blog posts. Things I found interesting or needed, or wanted to find later. Now, I just close out groups of tabs and briefly remember what I was researching.

Content aside, there’s also the design and code side of the site. It’s time to revisit.

Maybe a post a day is a lofty goal and I’ll fail tomorrow, but it’s some motivation.