It’s been a productive week! I’m very excited about my new website design.
Rebuilt my website
You’re looking at it! Just three short months after rebuilding my website with Astro, I rebuilt it again. This time, I am using Bridgetown, a static site generator written in Ruby. I did a write-up that goes into more detail but the new feature highlights are:
- Neobrutalist styling. Obviously, the visual face lift is huge. No more monochrome! Some panels get random colors every time the site is built. Heavy use of
box-shadow,:hover, andbackground-colorCSS properties. - Tagging. I’ve never made use of my tagged notes but it’s a main feature now. They make jumping around the site enjoyable and makes the whole thing more cohesive. I’ll be more thoughtful and consistent with my tags moving forward.
- URL redesign. I committed a cardinal sin and broke some links. As a result, my links are much shorter, intuitive, and sustainable! Standard posts live at
/p/<title>/, book notes are at/b/<title>/, tags are at/t/<tag>/, and weeknotes are at/w/YYYYwWW/. - New home page. I’ve never really known what to put on my front page. I took inspiration from Alessandro Muraro and added a “Recent Links” section that I will update from my weeknote links. Also added a small colophon to give credit to the people and tools that helped me make the site.
- I love my website again. I like browsing and clicking around my own website. I’m proud of it. I’m excited to use my chosen tools to hack on and develop it. That’s half the reason I have a website anyways.
Organized and backed up my photos
I take care to back up my journal, project, and notebook files every week but neglected to back up my photos. I know it’s something I should do but I just never got around to it. Until it hit me that all of my photos from the last two years of my life-changing Peace Corps journey were on my phone with a cracked screen and a disintegrating case.
I needed a system to ensure that all of my important photos never got lost. As a proponent of open protocols and standards, I didn’t want to just dump them all into one folder and let a photo manager program use a database to deal with it. Especially not a proprietary one.
I’ll do a proper write-up someday but someone had the same idea and built a Python tool that organizes photos into a directory tree of your choosing. It takes your photos, reads the metadata of each one, and puts it into the right folder. By the end, you have all your photos in one place, split up by day.
I took the same tool and all my photos from my phone and computer have been organized into the following format: /YYYY/MM/DD/YYYY-MM-DD-HH<hash>.ext where <hash> is the last 10 characters of the file checksum, unique to each photo. Here’s why it makes sense to me:
- Each photo has the date in the file name
- Photos sort down to the hour
- Easy to share or backup a single day folder
- Could (theoretically) search photos based on the checksum
Photos dumped into folders isn’t really organized, though, no matter how granular your folders are. There’s no tagging system to find all photos of my dog, for example. It’s not that easy to browse and search for photos. I don’t really need all that, though. I needed a system to back up my photos and that’s what I did. I can rest easy knowing that if my phone gets dropped into a toilet, my photos are safe.
Added rich text editor to Rails
I’ve been building a Rails application that allows users to create their own profile, à la Linktree. As much as I wanted a Markdown based editor, it doesn’t make sense for the user base. Instead, I opted for the included ActionText rich text editor that the Rails guides recommend.
It started out great. It was incredibly easy to implement. I ran bin/rails action_text:install, did some styling, and that was basically it.
The real challenge came when I wanted to customize the toolbar. ActionText uses the Trix rich text editor which is great but not very easy to customize. All I wanted to do was add a button that creates a link somewhere and make it big, like a Linktree item. I spent way too long trying to do that before I gave up.
So, for now, profile pages are edited using standard rich text. Big, important links will come later once I figure out how to do it.
Bits and Bobs
- Listened to Rex Orange County’s new album on repeat all week.
- foreverliketh.is contacted me and said some kind words and attached an invite to the 32-Bit Cafe community. I love it when strangers interact with me online!
- It’s finally cool enough to sleep without a blanket at night. So nice.
- Finished reading The agile comms handbook by Giles Turnbull. I highly recommend it to anyone who is doing stuff in the world and wants to communicate that to others. It’s pretty short and wildly actionable, packed full of useful information. I highlighted basically the whole book (and am using some principles here!). It’s geared for organizations but the tools are definitely useful for individuals, too.
- I’m so far behind on posting book notes and I’m going to make it a point to start chipping away at them.
Links
- What’s the best phone to do crimes on? by Search Engine. Interesting podcast about how the FBI created, distributed, and controlled the most popular phone for doing illegal activities on. Excellent storytelling by PJ Vogt, as usual.
- Everyone loves a roadmap by Jamie Arnold. Gantt charts are too rigid, agile methods are too reactive and short-term. Roadmaps are a good middle ground that provide teams with a good direction to go while still allowing for the real world to interfere and cause things to be late or over budget.
- Seven questions to build a roadmap by Jamie Arnold. The “how” follow-up from the last link. Ask questions to make better plans.
- How to Monetize a Blog at modem.io. Satirical article about the reality of obnoxious ads, popups, cookie notices, and push notifications that exist on the internet today. Really beautifully done article.
- Hanlon’s Razor by Sketchplanations. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
And, usually, I think people aren’t smart or capable enough, or in fact wicked enough, to carry out the conspiracies that people credit them for. Very often it’s the person assuming bad intentions and getting mad who suffers the most.
- History of Uncertainty by Microcosmographia.
We can spend our whole lives faffing around up in the higher tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy, because the lower tiers have been so locked-in for so long. What kind of person should I be? What job should I do? Where in the country, or the world, should I live? Who should I marry, if anyone? What hobbies should I pursue? Which particular hill should I fight to the death on in the inscrutable holy wars occurring within that hobby?
The assembling of a sufficiently complex and satisfying answer to what is true and good is up to each of us individually, and takes a lifetime. Whether we are cut out for it or not, whether it’s fair to ask this of every individual or not, each of us is on the hook to piece together some coherent sense of certainty about how to live, from the material available. Or to invent new material when what’s already there is insufficient.
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