Skip under construction message
Under construction

Under Construction

Building in public 👉 github repo / changelog

Category: links

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.

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

The Daughter as Detective. A bibliophile tries to understand her father through his favorite Swedish mystery books.

I don’t know why it’s so frustrating that my dad refuses to say or even think about why he likes the things he does, when his preoccupations run so deep and are so consistent.

Lots of Fun With Finnegan’s Wake

Peter O’Brien is currently illustrating the 628 pages of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Here’s a page from an article in the Globe and Mail:

Joyce used grist for Finnegans Wake from wherever he found it: the Bible, drinking songs, the morning paper. I likewise use images from various sources. These two trees are side-by-side at the cottage of a friend, and I thought they would be appropriate on a page where Joyce invokes Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and his work in the growing fields of sociology and ethnology.

Visit Peter’s site for more sample pages and links to other articles about the project, Lots of Fun With Finnegan’s Wake. He hopes to be finished by 2022.

Connection versus competition

From an article on mansplaining by Erynn Brook:

In competition (male) style communication the person who talks the longest and the loudest “wins”. Topics shift more frequently as speakers try to move conversation to their area of expertise/comfort, so that they can talk more, and thus “win”.

In connection (female) style communication the speaker “wins” by deepening connections with others. People tend to stay on topic longer in order to explore those connections and will pass the mic around/ask questions.

If you’ve ever done any teaching/speaking/group leading/camp counsellor-ing, you’ve probably used both styles, competition when you need to get everyone’s attention and connection when you’re leading.

Invention of the AeroPress

From Invention of the AeroPress, the story of inventor Alan Adler:

Among coffee aficionados, the AeroPress is a revelation. A small, $30 plastic device that resembles a plunger makes what many consider to be the best cup of coffee in the world. Proponents of the device claim that drinks made with the AeroPress are more delicious than those made with thousand-dollar machines. Perhaps best of all, the AeroPress seems to magically clean itself during the extraction process.

It definitely makes a good cup of coffee and is also super portable. I bought an extra one to leave at my parents place. That way I can avoid the high-test freeze-dried drip coffee that my dad tends to make.

History of the Star Wars logo

Anatomy of a Logo: Star Wars takes a look at the evolution of the iconic logo.

“I’d been reading a book the night before the meeting with George Lucas,” she says, “a book about German type design and the historical origins of some of the popular typefaces used today—how they developed into what we see and use in the present.” After Lucas described the kind of visual element he was seeking, “I returned to the office and used what I reckoned to be the most ‘fascist’ typeface I could think of: Helvetica Black.”

Inspired by the typeface, Rice developed a hand-drawn logo that translated well to the poster campaign, and ultimately to the movie itself. “I did have the screen in mind when I drew the logo originally,” explains Rice, who “stacked and squared” the words to better fit the brochure cover. It was an aesthetic choice that has lasted nearly three decades.