Matthew Lang

It seems that Heroku is no longer the go to place for deploying Rails applications. I’m having some success with Render for my Rails and static websites.

Today I finally got round to going through the Making VS Code Awesome book by Caleb Porzio. Let’s just say I am now a happier developer for reading it!

Our oldest has his first exam tomorrow afternoon. After a wee pop quiz with him tonight, he seems confident enough for tomorrow.

I made a wee decision over the weekend, that should see me gaining a bit more time back for myself and the family starting from the end of the summer. Good times ahead.

Now that we can all go back to the office, people are now realising that perhaps they would rather continue to work from home. This is due largely to the rising cost of living.

But there’s a problem. Employees who haven’t had to budget for train tickets, takeaway coffees or new office outfits for the past two years are now acutely aware of how much it costs to spend a day at your desk. And, worse, these costs are growing. Petrol prices are at an all-time high; transport fares have increased, and food and other essentials are on an upwards trajectory. That means an office day can hit the wallet hard.

— The sky-high cost of returning to the office by Sophia Epstein (BBC)

I’m a long-term work from homer. I’ve been doing it for the best part of the last 15 years. It’s simply what I prefer. As a slightly introverted person, I enjoy being able to get my head down and get on with the work. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy face-to-face meetings with people and I get that you need that time to meet and chat with co-workers. I would just prefer that there were other genuine benefits to going to the office.

One thing I have wanted to do for a long-time is to have a single checklist for the day that I can check items off for and then reset it for the next day. It doesn’t sound too difficult to do, but it never works entirely the way I would like it to in the various task manager apps I have used.

Many task manager apps re-create the tasks as they are crossed off the list. Now, that sounds fine for a single task, but when you have a bunch of tasks that you want to do daily, it can start to look slightly chaotic depending on the app. You may end up with tasks not completed from the day before, tasks completed for today, and some already completed for tomorrow.

I would like my list of tasks to stay completed for the day but not re-create the tasks for the following day. When the next day does come around, I would simply like to reset the checklist to start over again. I suppose the behaviour here is not to re-create the tasks but reset the list into a state so that it can be used again.

I created a page on my website that I can visit that contains a list of tasks with checkbox input elements that, when checked, are saved in the browser’s localStorage. There’s also a button there that, when clicked, resets all checkbox input elements back to unchecked. This allows me to start the list all over again.

After a couple of passes, I finally have it working now.

Every time Apple announces these Shot on the iPhone challenges, I’m always amazed that they have been taken on an iPhone. The macro challenge is no exception.

Anil Dash writes about the recent resurgence of the web. There are definitely many reasons why this is happening. Still, a key one for me is the growth of tools that make building websites easier for everyone.

While the core technology of the web is decades old, the tools that help make it and run have been quietly evolving into something extraordinary in the last few years, too. There’s a flourishing of powerful new frameworks that make it simpler than ever to build flexible, responsive, useful sites. New hosting platforms let those sites be deployed and delivered faster and more reliably than ever. And you can build one of these sites in literally under a minute, then collaborate with people anywhere in the world to iterate on making the site better.

— A Web Renaissance by Anil Dash

I might be pre-empting the return of the glory days of the web when blogs and RSS feeds were everywhere. As good as that would be, I don’t think we’ll ever return to those days. I do hope though, that we are seeing a return to the web as an open platform for people to build and share content.

Almost finished the new site design. Deployed some changes this morning to make it easier to read on mobile devices. There are still a few snagging points that will be resolved over the next few days, but I’m really pleased with the end result.

Updated my website to be more a stream of posts now than categorised content. I’m pleased with the results and the change to something that now acts more like a weblog. What it should have been really from the start.

I have followed several high-volume technology RSS feeds for so long that I can’t even remember when it started. Maybe in the Google Reader era? I don’t know.

It feels that catching up with these feeds through Feedbin is becoming more of a chore than I would like lately. It’s now come to the point where I barely read these feeds anymore and simply mark them all as read. I don’t want to still read, but perhaps just not as an RSS subscription.

I have re-located these feeds this week in my daily newsletter on Mailbrew. The latest newsletter just dropped into my inbox. I have to say it’s a much better reading experience just having a limit on the posts from these feeds. Although I’m only getting the last few posts for each feed, I find it easier to scan through my newsletter and pick out the links I want to read later. This may be a permanent change.

Cracking night for 9 holes with Ethan.

That’s minilog 4 complete. Quite the stack I’m building.

The 3 x 5 life of Patrick Rhone. Bonus points to Patrick for providing his GTD guided mindsweep as well!

Tom Critchlow on building a digital homestead.

Tom’s site is a treasure trove of good stuff for budding bloggers. Worth checking out!

Had a great nine holes with Drew today. He played fantastic today. So proud.

Kurt Harden gives us 40 albums that turn 40 this year. I recognise some of these from my folks record collection at the time.

A few things to zero out with Nicholas Bate.

Last month I mentioned my intention to look at BlitzJS. After a few hours of wrestling with a small application, I wondered if it would be better to spend some time refreshing my React knowledge first (it’s been a while since I used this) and then re-visiting BlitzJS. So I decided to park this for something else.

I wrote and maintained my own blogging CMS using Ruby on Rails for a couple of years. It was simple, and it had several excellent features like posts grouped by dates and supported posts without titles. There were a couple of downsides to the application, though.

Running even a small Rails application isn’t cheap, and while I can afford to host the app, it was money that I thought I could spend elsewhere. I looked to alternatives, but I couldn’t find anything with a significantly cheaper CMS to host. I started then to look towards a static site.

With some experience in using Jekyll, I started migrating all my posts both on the Rails application and in Micro.blog to my own Jekyll blog. I’m running the site on Render using one of their cheap static site plans, and I’m pleased with the result.

The added benefit of this is that I now have complete control over my blog, both in content and hosting. My content for the website is just a bunch of files. Posts use Markdown and are effectively just plain old text files. My images are stored in a folder that is served as part of the website. I find this much easier to control than digging into the database for a CMS.

As for hosting, I loved having my blog hosted on Micro.blog, but I did find it limiting in some ways. I would still recommend it for most people, but for me, self-hosting everything was the way to go.

One final benefit of using Jekyll is that I can still use Tailwind CSS to style the website and play about with it a bit more. You can see an example of this on my now page, where I have created a book component to show the progress of the books I am reading. I’ll be expanding on these over the year as I read more books.

It’s been a while since I made any changes with my writing prompt generator Writeabout, but it’s seen a flurry of activity over the last few weeks.

• Writeabout is now running on Rails 7 and Ruby 3.1. I’ve been keen to move away from Webpacker and embrace Rails' new JavaScript options with Rails 7.
• I’m using the latest version of Tailwind. I love Tailwind. I find it easier to build web pages using Tailwind’s classes.
• I replaced the dark/light theme with a better recommendation using the suggestion from the Tailwind docs. This behaviour is still bundled in a Stimulus controller, but I’m pleased with the result.
• Self-hosted font. I used to use Google Fonts to serve this website’s font, but I’m keen to reduce outside dependencies where I can, so I switched to self-hosting the font for Writeabout.

I’m still not done with Writeabout, though. As a small application, it provides me with an excellent place to try new things. Over the rest of the year, I plan to add the following two significant changes.

The first is an admin screen built on Hotwire. I’ve done some things with Hotwire, but nothing major. It would let me manage the prompts for the website and provide some information on API requests.

The second change will be an iOS app using React Native. Yes, I know React Native lets you build apps for both iOS and Android, but I’ll initially just be making a Writeabout app that supports iOS. If there’s not too much legwork to get it working in Android, I will also support that.

Updated the family WhatsApp group name from Pandemic Posse to Wordle Weirdos. A good sign of the the times.

Patrick Rhone lays out his mask guidelines for the future.

Nicholas Bate outlines some healing methods. Having done almost all of these, I can guarantee good results.

As Super Bowl halftime shows go, that is up there as one of my favourites.

I’ve started getting into the habit of reading source code again. It’s been too long since I have done this, and actually did wonders for my confidence. When the code you write isn’t that far from other people’s code, you know you are on the right track.

I was looking for a new font for this website and came across IBM’s Plex Sans. I’m very happy with the end result.