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I should be writing. I would like to write. I would like to like writing. But every time I think about it, I feel this imposing force in my mind, as if just considering it tires me out. I wonder if this is “the resistance” that Steven Pressfield talked about.
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I have the impression that browser vendors are trying to encourage web developers to use the native DOM API, instead of using wrappers like jQuery. But I still like using jQuery as the DOM API is so darn clunky. Does anyone actually prefer it to jQuery?
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I really appreciate the amount of hard work put in by those that run the ABC News Coronavirus live blog1.
They have been running it almost every day for about a year now, including public holidays. The reporting is timely and the answers to questions from the public is as informative as possible given the amount of information they had at the time.
But the thing that I appreciate the most is the little things they do to try and make dealing with a stressful issue slightly easier. Things like publishing words of encouragement from the readers: these comments really helped me during the dark days of the lock-down last winter. They also do not hold back on the animated GIFs.
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The live blog link changes daily so this is the link to the page that usually has it. ↩︎
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A Quick Review of the Year
Here are a few words about the year gone by, and what I’m hoping to focus on the year ahead. It’s not a full “year in review” type post, although there’s a bit of that, and there’s no dramatic insight or anything of that nature. It’s more of a chance for reflection, plus a bit of a document for future me on what the year was like. Personally, as difficult as this past year was, I wouldn’t necessarily say 2020 was a bad year. Continue reading →
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I’m really liking Stimulus for JavaScript development. The fact that it gives me an easy way to add frontend logic with server-side rendering, instead of requiring me to code my entire UI in something like React, makes development more fun than I anticipated.
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I’m interested in starting a daily log, similar to what Dave Winer and a few others I follow on Micro.blog are doing. I’ve tried starting one using Little Outliner a few months ago, but I never got around to keeping it up to date. I’m hoping for something that is a bit more fit for purpose: as much as outliners are useful — I use them for keeping notes for work — I’m not sure it’s the best tool for me for daily logging. There are a few other features that I’m looking for: such as the ability to record private entries, and maybe some very to-do base features.
So, I spent some time today kicking off a new Buffalo project to build something that I think might work for me. I managed to get something running privately, although it’s pretty bare bones at the moment. We’ll see down the line if I’ll actually use it.
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I subscribe to a few blogs that are well known for posting daily. Today, one of them is late. “Why haven’t you posted today?”, I imagined asking them, slightly perturbed.
Then, I imagined them smiling and answering back: “Why haven’t you?”
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I took the plunge and purchased Logic Pro today. Although the purchase itself is not super interesting, the fact that I’m putting that much money into a piece of software that’s only available for macOS is an indication that I’m now all in on Apple’s desktop platform.
This is something that I’ve been quite tentative about for a while. I first came to macOS in 2017 after using Linux for my home setup. Linux was great for software development but I wanted to get back into music production, something that Linux is not known for. I’ve never really used the Mac at this stage but I knew that macOS was a decent platform for both activities, so moving to it was enticing. It also helped that I learnt about the user experience of the macOS from all the Apple tech podcasts that I listen to, like ATP and The Talk Show.
But I tend to hedge these sort of moves, so even though I started using a Mac Mini, I didn’t commit to purchasing any expensive software (say, anything more than $30-50) that only runs on Apple’s platforms. I had my doubts that I’ll actually go back to Linux (I knew I wasn’t going to Windows though); and after using a Linux laptop for a couple of months, I remembered how Linux has still got some way to go to provide a great user experience. Nevertheless, I always felt that I needed an exit.
Well, that door is now closed. Purchasing the Nova text editor last month was probably the first indication that I’m intending to stay, and the purchase of Logic Pro today seems to have solidified it.
So I guess now I’m officially a committed Mac user.
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Follow on from the last post, I also had the opportunity to spot a few trains. Here’s one on it’s way to Bendigo, taken just outside Woodend.
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Today is the last day of work for the year, and although I haven’t got much planned for the break, it would be good to have some time off.
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I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee ever imagined that we would be using the web as a replacement for things like phones, radios, and televisions.
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A Tour of Domain Records for Email
There are growing concerns, in the circles that I travel in, about the use of “free” email services like Gmail, that lock you into a service that may not have your whole interest in mind. The remedy for this is to use an email address with a domain that you control. Setting one up can seem a little daunting for those have haven’t done this: thanks to the wild west that is email, a hodgepodge of technologies have grown up in an attempt to stop the occurrences of spam and impersonations. Continue reading →
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Follow up from yesterday’s post about my non-reading habits, a colleague of mine shared this article about the topic. It looks like the condition I have is tsundoku, which is “a Japanese term used to describe a person who owns a lot of unread literature.”
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Dealing With Errors in Go
There’s a lot to like about Go, and I’ll happily admit being a huge fan of the language. But it will be dishonest of me not to acknowledge that some aspects of programming in Go results in more code than the equivalent in another language. My guess is that the best example of this is how Go programs deal with errors. For those unfamiliar with how errors work in Go, the short version is that they are just like any other type that you deal with — like strings and integers — and they have no special control structure to handle them in any specific way. Continue reading →
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I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve got this annoying habit of seeing an article that looks interesting, and I decide to… just not read it. Instead I “save it for later”. The result: I end up never reading the article at all.
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Vivaldi - My Recommended Alternative to Chrome
I’m seeing a few people on Micro.blog post about how Chrome Is Bad. Instead of replying to each one with my recommendations, I figured it would be better just to post my story here. I became unhappy with Chrome about two years ago. I can’t remember exactly why, but I know it was because Google was doing something that I found distasteful. I was also getting concerned about how much data I was making available to Google in general. Continue reading →
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Revisiting the decision to build a CMS
It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my decision to write a CMS for a blog that I was planning. I figured it might be time for an update. In short, and for the second time this year, I’ve come to the conclusion that maintaining a CMS is not a good use of my time. The largest issue was the amount of effort that would have been needed in order to work on the things that don’t relate to content, such as styling. Continue reading →
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It’s a shame that more and more bloggers are moving to email newsletters in leau of RSS. Even for bloggers that don’t charge for their content, I’m seeing more blogs that are encouraging readers to sign up to an email newsletter, instead of providing a link to an RSS feed.
I can see why they do this. Email addresses are valuable, and sites like Stratechery and services like Substack show that it’s possible to have a viable business writing a daily newsletter to people willing to pay for it. But one thing Ben Thompson offers that Substack doesn’t is a private RSS feed for subscribers, so they can read the daily updates within a feed reader. This is how I use to consume Stratechery, before the release of the daily update podcast.
So email subscriptions makes sense for those writing for a living, but I’m not sure it makes sense for those maintaining a free blog. If your content is available without charge, then it makes sense to me to offer an RSS feed to those that prefer to read your content within a feed reader. The reading experience in NetNewsWire is preferable to the one offered by my email client, and I don’t need to see all the emails that I’m trying to avoid. By all means offer email subscriptions as well, but don’t require one just so that I can see your latest updates.
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A Brief Look at Stimulus
Over the last several months, I’ve been doing a bit of development using Buffalo, which is a rapid web development framework in Go, similar to Ruby on Rails. Like Ruby on Rails, the front-end layer is very simple: server-side rendered HTML with a bit of jQuery augmenting the otherwise static web-pages. After a bit of time, I wanted to add a bit of dynamic flare to the frontend, like automatically fetch and update elements on the page. Continue reading →
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Some uninformed thoughts about Salesforce acquiring Slack
John Gruber raised an interesting point about the future of Slack after being purchased by Salesforce: First, my take presupposes that the point of Slack is to be a genuinely good service and experience. […] To succeed by appealing to people who care about quality. Slack, as a public company, has been under immense pressure to do whatever it takes to make its stock price go up in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Teams. Continue reading →
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I love the idea of events like Microblogvember to help reinforce the act of writing frequently. I will admit it was difficult at times, but I definitely find it beneficial participating in these events when they come around. #mbnov
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It’s interesting how the activities that would have seen quite pedestrian before the lock-down, like going to a cafe, are quite novel after the lock-down. #mbnov
