Andy’s Micro Blog
Hi pals, I’m Andy, and this is my Micro Blog. It’s made with Eleventy, lives on Netlify and auto-posts content to my Twitter account, via IFTTT.
You can see the source code, here.
Hi pals, I’m Andy, and this is my Micro Blog. It’s made with Eleventy, lives on Netlify and auto-posts content to my Twitter account, via IFTTT.
You can see the source code, here.
I feel incredibly demoralised today.
I’ve been super careful about COVID since February and after seeing scenes in Soho, Bradford and elsewhere, yesterday: it’s only a matter of time before another lockdown comes around.
It’s my kids I feel really bad for. They haven’t seen family or friends for so long and have only just gone back to nursery. They don’t understand, but it’s clearly all taking a toll on them.
This pandemic and lockdown has destroyed my mental health too--mainly because I’ve already got issues with health anxiety and obsessively hand wash at the best of times.
I’ve no idea what state my mental health will be in at the end of the year.
I'm really hoping for a miracle, but it wont come.
This Eleventy course has been by far the most challenging writing project I’ve ever done. It’s been way over 20,000 words at this point, over—at the time of writing—21 lessons.
Even if it helps just one person get Eleventy, it’ll all be worth it.
I’ve written 0 lessons for the eleventy course today. I planned to write at least two (even though I have 4 in my bullet journal lol).
Having 37 lessons to write is a real mountain, I must say. I’m into double-digits now, but I refuse to force myself to write, if I’m not feeling it. I don’t want the quality of the course to suffer. This is one of my favourite parts about being my own boss: giving myself maximum freedom!
I’m just gonna do some admin and play with the kids in the garden instead and maybe I’ll write a lesson later.
I’m re-working a section of my talk “Keeping It Simple With CSS That Scales” today. C-BEUT is gone and instead replaced with CUBE CSS - Composition Utility Block Exception.
I see composition as a really important aspect of keeping things simple. Micro-optimisation in my experience, has usually resulted in fragile re-inventions of core language capabilities and we’re seeing that again with various re-inventions of the Stack from Every Layout.
I’ll blog about it on piccalilli later.
C-BEUT was such a shit name.
One thing I’m getting sick of hearing is "the government did a good job with the hand they were dealt".
They didn’t. They fucked up.
Every other government around the globe got dealt a similar hand, yet we’re only just behind America in deaths.
If you write to get lots of views, your posts will probably never be great.
If you write really good content, though, you’ll achieve the former by proxy.
It’s all about patience. So many of my old articles did nothing, but I’m a completely different and much better writer now for persisting.
I can also link pretty much all success in the web world back to writing. Publishing on my own blog has been endlessly useful too.
The blog platforms will get you short term views, sure, but what happens to your hard work when they’re gone?
Lastly: anyone can be a great writer. I did terrible at school, but over the last five or six years, I’ve persisted and improved. You just gotta work at this stuff, like anything else.
I’ve de-clamshelled my MacBook Pro and because I only use one screen, I wanted to keep it occupied.
I came across this: https://www.kaleidosync.com/visualizer
It reminds me of the old iTunes days.
There is no faster (pun intended) way to slow down a site than to use a bunch of JavaScript.
https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2020-04-21-the-cost-of-javascript-frameworks/
This is a fantastically detailed piece by Tim Kadlec. The evidence really do paint a worrying picture and hopefully this can be a good source for those trying to improve things in their company.
Tip for Firefox users on Mac.
By default, you can’t tab to links. To fix it:
I’m doing some print CSS stuff for Piccalilli invoices. It’s not something I do very often!
Luckily, Rachel Andrew has written this excellent guide over on Smashing Mag: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/01/designing-for-print-with-css/