Family guy and web developer
After years of using Solarized Dark as my preferred colour theme for coding, I’m starting to find that I’m now preferring a lighter themes for when I’m writing code. Solarized Light for Sublime Text and Bluloco Light for VS Code.
Solarized Dark is still my preferred color theme for the terminal though.
Sent a few suggestions this morning for the perfect album to my buddy Kurt in Ohio. Suggestions included Bloc Party, Oasis, Massive Attack and Eric Clapton.
Anyone else care to chip in with suggestions for the perfect album?
Michael Wade reminds us that slow can be more.
After a couple of weeks using Stoop, I’ve decided to remove the app from my phone.
The app itself is a novel idea for those who want to read their newsletters outside of their day to day email, but there were a few gripes I had with this app.
The design of the app itself didn’t work for me. The carousel-style of newsletters at the top and the list of newsletters at the bottom wasted a lot of space in the user interface. I would have prefered just a list of newsletters that I could scroll through.
The thought of having an app for newsletters only available on a mobile device was too restrictive. If there’s one activity I don’t mind doing on multiple devices, it’s reading. At least with my newsletters delivered to my inbox or to Feedbin’s newsletter address, I could catch up with newsletters regardless of what device I was near.
Stoop is a nice idea, and might work for those who simply can’t afford to be without their mobile device, but I don’t want to be tied to my iPhone for the sake of a few newsletters.
The debate about the use of Javascript in the web industry and the role of the front-end developer continues after Chris Coyier’s post, The Great Divide and now a follow-up from Rachel Andrews.
There is something remarkable about the fact that, with everything we have created in the past 20 years or so, I can still take a complete beginner and teach them to build a simple webpage with HTML and CSS, in a day. We don’t need to talk about tools or frameworks, learn how to make a pull request or drag vast amounts of code onto our computer via npm to make that start. We just need a text editor and a few hours. This is how we make things show up on a webpage.
— HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points by Rachel Andrews
Rachel’s post reminds us though that while Javascript frameworks might be all the rage at the moment, we’re neglecting the foundations of the web, HTML and CSS. And how they can still be used to educate those new to the process of creating websites.
Maybe as an industry, we should still be focusing on these fundamentals. Not just for those new to the industry, but for everyone in the industry.
Over the last couple of days, I put the finishing touches to the Commonmarks application so that others can deploy it easily to Heroku. The reason I went down this route is that self-hosting Commonmarks is a something I want people to be able to do, but I’m not at the stage yet where Commonmarks can be quickly deployed to any SAAS platform or even your own server. Going down the Heroku route was a short term solution.
If you take a look at the top of the README file on the Commonmarks Github repository you’ll see a Deploy To Heroku button that you can use to deploy. You’ll need a Heroku account to do this. The add-ons needed for the application to run are free including the dynos required to run the application. I’ve been running Commonmarks on a free dyno for over a month now without any problem.
This brings me to the next step. I’m now working on Commonmarks as a hosted bookmarking product that anyone can sign up for if they don’t want to run their own version of Commonmarks. I appreciate there are people on both sides of the fences, but there are probably more people who want to go with the hosted option than the self-hosted option. I’m not looking to have this running for another couple of weeks, and I’ll be initially opening up with a small beta to get feedback.
Updates will follow.
Driving to work this and I caught a small glimpse of what would have been a great sunrise. I drove on thinking how good it would have been to just stop and take it in.
Finally, all done with the bait store. Now Drew is looking for his next mega build!
I would love to have seen the “Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth” exhibition in New York.
The picture depicting Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug was the first the image I seen of Tolkien’s books as a kid. I might not be able to get to New York for this, but it might be time for a re-read of the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
via kottke.org
Good advice from Derek Sivers on keeping a daily diary:
It works best as a nightly routine. Just take a minute and write at least a few sentences. If you have time, write down everything on your mind. Clear it all out. But if you miss a night, make time the next morning to write about the previous day.
— Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals by Derek Sivers
I also like his idea for topic journals.
For each subject that you might have ongoing thoughts about, start a separate “Thoughts On” journal. Whenever you have some thoughts on this subject, open up that file, write today’s date, then start writing.
— Benefits of a daily diary and topic journals by Derek Sivers