Watching the big yin playing in the Newton Shield final tonight at Greenock Golf Club. Still early days for scores but looking good in a couple of the early games for Elderslie.
Taken the first steps with my own Micro.blog theme, bothy. Still a while to go before it’s ready as a plug-in.
What to build vs how to build
There’s a difference between what to build and how to build. I hadn’t given it much thought until today, when I started to realise that I could improve the time it takes me to make an image template for a product of mine by automating the creation of the different classes and modules needed for each image template.
I spent an hour tonight working on a script that generates all the necessary code I needed. In addition to creating each code file, it also generated the absolute minimum amount of code required for each file to run successfully.
When building products, I’ve always prioritised what to build over how to make, but I need to start splitting my time more evenly between the two. Spending time on one can have some profound benefits for the other.
After what seems like forever, Bear Notes has released a public beta of their web app. I had a sneak peek this morning for a few minutes and was impressed by how much it resembles and behaves like the iOS app.
Seth Godin’s latest post “Notes to myself” can be filed under “lists that matter”.
Prototype finished for my Micro.blog theme
I’m pretty happy with the Hugo copy of my own Micro.blog theme I’ve been working on for the last couple of days. It will have a few customisation options for colour scheme and fonts.
I’ve been trying to clone the blank theme when creating this new theme in Micro.blog, but it appears to be using the Sumo theme from my current blog instead of pulling the blank theme from GitHub.
Hopefully by the weekend, I’ll have a working version for others to use.
I didn’t realise that running a different blog under the same account on Micro.blog still posts to the timeline under your account. I was kind of hoping it didn’t. Thought it might have been a way to work on my blog theme using a different blog.
A first pass at my own Micro.blog theme. I have more CSS than I actually wanted, but making it readable with just enough CSS was the goal for today. I now need to determine what to add or edit to enable it to work with Micro.blog, so I can upload it.
First steps with my new Micro.blog theme
In my foolish quest to build my own Micro.blog theme, I spent some of the evening learning about Hugo and how its theming works. It is not dissimilar to Jekyll in many respects, and I think I have enough to start working on my own theme.
Initially, I’m going with a really basic theme—no colours, frameworks, or complex layouts—just a single column with basic text elements. This will allow me to see what the minimum I can get away with for my theme is. That’s the easy part.
The hard part—it’s definitely not one of my strengths—is putting together a design for a second theme. Web design is not my strong point.
I want to make something that isn’t wildly unique, but has enough to stand out from the rest of the Micro.blog themes. I might let this one simmer away for a few days and check out a few other blogs I like and see what can be done.
This weekend though, the plan is just to have a basic working theme.
The idea of building my own Micro.blog theme is still gnawing away at me. As if I don’t already have enough on my plate.
Learning through development tools
Today, during a major debugging session with a Rails application, I wanted to condense what was in the logs between two consecutive requests to understand what was happening. It was too much to read through everything. I just needed to scan through all these requests and flag whether they were successful or not.
So today, rather than scribbling down another Ruby script, which would have been easy, I started a log analyser using Rust. It’s early days for the script, but it already compiles a list of endpoints, which is a good start.
It’s a reminder to myself that there are plenty of development tools and aids I can build using a variety of languages and frameworks. And if I only use that tool a few times, that’s okay, too. At least I will have learned something.
Another one taking part in Small Web July
To try to get back into regular blogging again, I have decided to take up this invitation to Small Web July.
Here are my guidelines for the month:
- Write at least one blog post a day - This can be anything from quoting another post, sharing some thoughts or anything else really. The one thing I want to do, though, is to move beyond just sharing the bare minimum. Far too many of my posts are short enough not to need titles on Micro.blog, and I want to start moving away from short posts to longer posts.
- Engage a bit more on Micro.blog - I noticed that my volume of replies to people and from people is relatively low. I used to reply to posts a lot in the past, but for some reason, I find myself rarely engaging with other people on Micro.blog.
- Spend more time reading - My reading habit is returning, but not as quickly as I would like. Some fiction books I’ve recently bought are not grabbing my attention. On a whim, I picked up Andy Weir’s book, Hail Mary, for my Kobo. I loved reading The Martian, so I’m sure this will be something I will enjoy reading.
That’s it for the month. I could have added more things to do, but with schools off here in Scotland, I tend to find that between now and mid-August is a time for setting aside any primary goals and just enjoying the boys being about the house and sitting in the back garden when possible.
I noticed that Annie Mueller is participating as well.
Is anyone else taking part?
Star Wars Battlefront 2 still going strong
Though there have been some dips since then, interest in the game has, overall, grown. Star Wars Battlefront 2 reached a new all-time concurrent player peak — 35,892 players — on June 22, with a consistent 20,000 people online at any given time. And these numbers are just for Steam; the game is available on consoles and Windows PC on EA’s proprietary launcher, but concurrent player numbers are not easily available there.
— Star Wars Battlefront 2 Is More Popular Than Ever Thanks To A Dedicated Fan Community
I’m not really surprised that this game is still going strong. Despite the rocky start EA had with the loot box system, the game has remained a popular choice. I still play it weekly. Maybe it’s the fact that I am a huge Star Wars fan, but games like Fortnite and Overwatch haven’t remained on my radar, and it’s been a long time since I played either of those games.
I updated my Rails app’s start script to launch Docker containers for PostgreSQL and Redis. I also added a kill script to stop them when I’m done coding. I hope this helps my struggling laptop battery by properly shutting down services.
I finally set up Claude Code. Very impressed with it so far.
