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.