Just completed another housekeeping on the 800+ feeds in my FreshRSS instance. There were about 30 links reporting errors. Some had disappeared completely, some just needing removing and re-adding and others just got removed if I couldn’t get them to work.
Feels good now to have a clean set of feeds again
Spent a couple of hours pruning unwanted websites that had accumulated in my hosting and writing an email filter for a domain I want to retire next year so I can see who’s still using it and warn them in advance that it’s closing.
Some time ago, I implemented north east arrows on my external links to provide a visual differentiator for readers. So something like this. Over the holidays, my brother sent me a screen shot of one of my posts and I was horrified by the ugly block arrows on his iPhone. They are supposed to be subtle.
It’s almost certainly something to do with the modern font stacks I use where that character doesn’t render well on whatever the default font family is on the iPhone. Another thing to put on the list of things to fix.
There’s no rational reason for this, but I can’t get it out my head so I can see me recklessly diving in … I want to build my own static site generator.
This would be for my root domain. I’m going to keep using WP as the back end CMS. Recording the thought here so I have a reference point when going crazy in the future.
Just saw Zak’s calendar visualisation of the seasons for the garden section of his blog.
Really neat idea. It would look excellent with a clickable bar for each post in the section so you can navigate different season’s posts more easily.
Just noticed that my post about the first steps in creating my archive was the 200th post in this blog. And my aim is to be read in 200 years.
Very happy with the symmetry on display here
You often hear people talk about “mobile first” design, and there are endless opinions about what it means. Yet I rarely hear about the @media only screen and (orientation: landscape) CSS selector that applies when you tilt your phone to landscape.
Video applications like YouTube and Netflix have this instinctively built in as a way to view the movie full screen. But most applications look pretty terrible if you accidentally tip the phone.
But it could be a whole new interface option for users. The unifying messaging app Beeper utilises this mode pretty nicely.
I’ve been posting photos to my own version of instagram now for nearly two years and there’s around 550 captioned photos so far.
At some point in the future, I’ll figure out how to include the date also on the caption, but for now I just enjoy having my own photofeed to document things I see every week
Just stumbled into Matthew Taylor’s article on creating custom HTML tags which I want to start applying as a way to structure more complex blog post content in a way that doesn’t embed WP theme specific information.
His site also has some rather simple and brilliant responsive layout markup patterns.
Updated my blog look to use a modern font stack so it will look slightly different on different devices, but hopefully in a way that blends in with system fonts.
Also look the opportunity to tune the line height and the space above link lines to help the the text breathe a bit.
I only have 170 posts on this blog but already I can’t keep track of articles I’ve already written. Quite often I have the sense of having written an idea before, but I can’t find the reference.
I try to treat my posts as a wiki where I can, cross linking ideas instead of repeating them. But I have no idea what system I can use when I reach 500, 1000, 2000 posts.
I’ve got posts on this blog which are for RSS subscribers only. Now I’ve made them completely invisible to web users. Here’s an example of what happens if you try to access one from the web.
The entire collection of all my RSS posts are collected together here. Nope, you can’t see them from the web either. But … you can subscribe to that collection by entering https://thoughts.uncountable.uk/topic/rss-only/feed/ into your feed reader (subscribing to my main feed will also receive the new ones – one coming up this Saturday).
Just upgraded my 2015 Dell laptop to Linux Mint 22. Took about half an hour and went very smoothly. Supported until 2029, by which time the laptop will be probably on it’s last lap.
There’s really no need to ditch relatively new hardware just because windows decides it no longer wants to run. This one has 8Gb RAM and 6.2Gb is free when the system first boots up. And every application I use is blazingly fast.
Spent the last week or so trying to improve the experience for people who follow my blog via RSS, or visit it from the web.
I’m only going to publish a maximum of two main posts a day at set times. This means I can set up quite a bit of content in advance, so I give the RSS subscribers a teaser of what’s coming soon in a small note at the bottom.
I can now post quick thoughts to the Quick Thoughts section of my blog and they won’t appear on the front page or the main RSS feed.
So no-one alse is disturbed by these random things.
But if you do happen to want to see them, you can visit the page or subscribe to them via RSS using the url https://thoughts.uncountable.uk/topic/quick-thoughts/feed
The UK is having a general election on Thursday 4 July 2024.
There are two things you need to take part. The first is to be on the electoral register before this date, which you can do here. The second is to have photo id on the day, which you can find more information about here.
If you haven’t voted in an election before, but are eligible, please consider doing so this year. Collectively, we need to take responsibility for the future direction of this country.