Rough day.
But I made some new friends (they're green).
TO-DID:
- I widgetized my sidebar. That means nothing to you, but I can edit his site a whole lot faster now.
- Also means nothing to you: I'm leveraging the CSS to slug trick to instantly convert some pages to gallery view, which is really sick tbh
- A lot more sections added: OOTD, stuff i made, and an entire list of links in my profile
- Started a You section and hope I can come up with things to give you
- Theres a Random box in the navbar with whatever in it. It changes on every page and refresh. It can be a random fact about me, an album recommendation, or a link to a site i like. Or whatever.
- Posted a full write up and tutorial for the RSS Dashboard on my Substack (what an exhausting thing to do, I think I hated it)
TO-DO:
- Start Ford concepts
Add Feed Reader download and tutorial to Substack- Finalize marketing outline @ work
- Beg someone to approve the new research page @ work
- Finish the zine + lecture outline
- Find all the missing parts of my cyberdeck lol
Dig through the hard drive for the codebase I wrote for Spirit to cry about- Figure out how to document the last two years worth of 9-5 work
Attend coworker's webinar May 13 @ 4PMRed mary janes come in the mail on wednesday :>New gardener starts on May 14- Substack: How AI sucked at the knowledgebase CMS
- Substack: How AI sucked at writing this blog
- Introduce my copywriter to my fundraising coordinator
- New bookstore
- New turkish restaurant by me
- Start grant writing lmaoooo
I'm almost afraid to say it; but I am having a very good day. I needed it. I haven't been in a good mood for a good while. But it's been a great week, if I'm honest.
My new gardener started yesterday and he did an amazing job. I feel true relief and hope for my front yard for once in my life. I paid off my car last month too, which means budget for my gardener is going to be consistent and solid. I can't begin to explain the weight that's lifted from my shoulders now that I have some help.
I met with my new/old client and the gig is amazing. I'll be designing a web campaign for Ford and I'm already personally familiar with the program enough to know what it needs. There's no budget, a decent timeline, and I don't have to code it when I'm done prototyping it. Couldn't ask for a better opportunity. I'm excited to go all out on this one, since I've learned a lot more patience and am in general a much better designer than I used to be. I have really old files from the last time I worked for Ford and yikes. I got asked to work for Ford a couple months ago through someone else and remember actually laughing at him but I'd much rather be freelancing than part of their system.
I deployed my first external instance of the RSS feed and the surgery was a success. Deployment was as smooth as could be. It's more than ready for a substack writeup.
Somehow still massaging this blog and added a game changer:
<body class="<?= h($bodyClass) ?>">
and
$bodyClass = 'page page--home' . ($activeTag ? ' tag--' . $activeTag : '');
Defining a variable to create a body class off of a page's slug on this site allows me to differentiate between every single page on this blog by slug.
That means I can target specific posts, tags, and pages-- anything with an ID -- to style separately. I applied it to the Walks and Selfies tags to size the images on selfies into a three column layout and take the background off of the Walks page to make the images feel more integrated into the overall layout.
These were really tests because I want to start posting collections of things on here.
Also learned a new trick that allows me to center the horizontal images in my selfie gallery. I have never done something like this before, but the whole container needs to be display: flex, each image needs to be wrapped in a paragraph tag, and then the paragraph tag needs a defined alignment. I'm used to doing this with flexboxes, but not within paragraphs applied to the img tags.
Putting it all together:
.post--self article img {
width: 32%;
margin: 2px;
vertical-align: middle;
}
It works great. Just janky enough for a blog like this.
Lastly, I applied the body + slug tag trick to a redesigned Playlist tag that takes off all post meta and leaves just the bandcamp embed. This required me to also install a code editor into the CMS but I already needed to do that for other reasons.
Dang, there's nothing to cross off my to-do list today but I still got a lot done. I promise.
TO-DO:
- Add Feed Reader download and tutorial to Substack
- Finalize marketing outline @ work
- Beg someone to approve the new research page @ work
- Finish the zine + lecture outline
- Find all the missing parts of my cyberdeck lol
Dig through the hard drive for the codebase I wrote for Spirit to cry about- Figure out how to document the last two years worth of 9-5 work
Attend coworker's webinar May 13 @ 4PMRed mary janes come in the mail on wednesday :>New gardener starts on May 14- Substack: How AI sucked at the knowledgebase CMS
- Substack: How AI sucked at writing this blog
- Introduce my copywriter to my fundraising coordinator
- New bookstore
- New turkish restaurant by me
- Start grant writing lmaoooo
After I first published this blog, I thought the design was so plain and low maintenance that it wouldn't be anything like the old days of grooming and preening a blog all day, but I was wrong. I just spent a disgusting amount of time updating absolute fuck all on here and had the time of my life, really.
- Everything's smaller. Just because. I feel like old internet was just smaller. There's something so throwback about fonts and containers being too small and too tight that wasn't present before. I made everything smaller and it actually looks better in a worse way idk.
- Added a Button marquee -- this was an early internet non-negotiable, although the buttons themselves are actually a new idea. We weren't really thirsting to talk about Notepad coding and Winamp because those things were a given for the time. My fanlistings were updated similarly.
- Blog tags were added to the sidebar. I have a lot more content than I put in the nav but needed a different treatment to give the sidebar some body and the tags really did it. Tags used to be clouds, remember those? I haven't seen a retroblog do that one yet.
I also fiddled around some more with the RSS reader and was able to password protect it and write the feeds to a JSON file rather than local storage, which would mean your feeds go away if you ever cleared the cache. Another Claude burp if you ask me. It took some real time to iron out the accounting bit of it-- the first approach was Python-based and a little too much for a hosted server like this. Had to really wrestle with the code to set it up like something I'm more into. I tested a new instance of the feed just to make sure the files are downloadable and easy to work with.
I plan to write a tutorial for it on substack, which really makes this blog resemble my old one. Already wondering what to cook up next.
Oh I forgot. It works on mobile now too so now I can do healthier things on my phone. It's kinda sad that RSS isn't as popular as it used to be; maybe the demand for it will go up if we're loud about it. The CNN feed is actually three years outdated, isn't that sickening? And these feeds don't update for a few hours or maybe once a day, so it's not as high fructose an experience as looking at a feed or TL. But. wasn't that kind of that point?
I also made some buttons for the site itself, something I haven't done in over 20 years. Almost felt weird. They're bad too. We'll get better, we always do.
TO-DO:
- Add Feed Reader download and tutorial to Substack
- Finalize marketing outline @ work
- Beg someone to approve the new research page @ work
- Finish the zine + lecture outline
- Find all the missing parts of my cyberdeck lol
Dig through the hard drive for the codebase I wrote for Spirit to cry about- Figure out how to document the last two years worth of 9-5 work
Attend coworker's webinar May 13 @ 4PMRed mary janes come in the mail on wednesday :>New gardener starts on May 14- Substack: How AI sucked at the knowledgebase CMS
- Substack: How AI sucked at writing this blog
- Introduce my copywriter to my fundraising coordinator
- New bookstore
- New turkish restaurant by me
- Start grant writing lmaoooo
Accidentally lost a bunch of my day to making an RSS reader with Claude. Not mad at it. I didn't realize how many ads were on all my favorite sites until I reduced everything to their feeds. Every four posts on my tumblr feed is an ad when I think about it. Almost a third of the CNN homepage is bullshit articles about Amazon deals and nap dresses and whatever white people are overpaying for these days.
I guess now's a better time than ever. Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram didn't used to assault you with posts from people you don't follow and I could stomach being on those platforms then. I could add this to my lecture or make a lecture just about this tool, which is nice. Other feed reading tools I found for desktop wanted you to pay after a few feeds which is bullshit because everything is everything. Does make me wonder if browser extensions or app store solutions may actually be nice.
This actually took a ton of iterating on Claude. I attempted to password protect it and Claude took the laziest and shittiest route possible until I demanded specifics. That's... concerning. There was also a ton of errors that had to be addressed after tests-- I'd hate to pay per prompt, it almost feels intentional that things don't turn out right on the first few passes.
Features:
- Add any RSS feed
- Customize background and text colors for each source
- Categorize feeds and filter on the dashboard by category or source
- Toggle between grid and list views for preferred reading experience
- Post counts displayed on the sidebar
- Animated loading and refreshing
Challenges:
- Twitter doesn't use RSS anymore, a combination of Nitter.net and RSS-bridge can compensate
- RSS Bridge is also very inconsistent with Instagram. I got some posts to go through, but there is no consistency here. Videos and gallery posts are not supported at this time.
- I'd love for the youtube posts to play the video, but the feeds aren't made to pull in embed codes
- The counts are in general and not since your last refresh
- I'd like a future iteration that uses logos and user images from the sources but that's more work than it needs to be. Maybe the prompt would be overly annoying, but it would need to pull in some sort of font or icon based on the source URL, which isn't always accurate because I use RSS Bridge for many of them. Maybe it's a selector instead but again. Another step I wouldn't want to do.
- It would be cool if the bridge was built right into this app and you could pull whole feeds by username instead of using a third party bridge.
Anyways I love this thing. It's nice to read the news without navigating all the inconsistently sized images and ads. I'm also finally looking at tweets without being asked to log in constantly. It's kinda sad that the internet is in a place like this, but I'm glad there's still something you can do about it.
TO-DO:
- Finalize marketing outline @ work
- Beg someone to approve the new research page @ work
- Finish the zine + lecture outline
- Find all the missing parts of my cyberdeck lol
Dig through the hard drive for the codebase I wrote for Spirit to cry about- Figure out how to document the last two years worth of 9-5 work
Attend coworker's webinar May 13 @ 4PMRed mary janes come in the mail on wednesday :>- New gardener starts on May 14
- Substack: How AI sucked at the knowledgebase CMS
- Substack: How AI sucked at writing this blog
- Introduce my copywriter to my fundraising coordinator
- New bookstore
- New turkish restaurant by me
- Start grant writing lmaoooo
A coworker deleted three weeks worth of my code with no backup to supplement. So that was my day.
I also finally found the screenshots I've been missing for Spirit for my portfolio. Not a whole lot of luck with Egyptian Theater, though I found exactly one more screenshot of it to round out that entry. Better than nothing. It's not like me to lose an entire psd like that but at least I had exactly one screenshot of it with real data attached.
Another client reached back out to me. This one I do actually like. Going to find out what he needs on Friday. I'm glad I'm still on good terms with the guy and despite him having a whole development shop, still thinks I'm the right person to reach out to when his devs can't figure out a certain flow.
Here's the work I did for Spirit though. It was one of the better projects back at the agency because for once there was at least some professional photos involved. Vue.js was really annoying to work with and I don't even know why we went with it. Probably because it switched over states and timezones readily. Hardly worth it. Hardly consistent. Though I'm glad to not be writing anything in vue, I do miss this project and the people that I met while working on it.
Rest in Peace in the Big Sky in the Big Sky.
In the slightest of updates to this site, I separated post containers apart. I don't know. makes me feel better. I also added pill styling around tags, which makes this blog probably more modern than it should be but I could very much see my 14 year old self wanting the same thing.
The gals' webinar is tomorrow. It'll be nice to watch someone else do it for once. They're presenting all the updates I helped design and publish to the instructor software. They're nice and nervous, just like I was. Can't wait to see what they've cooked up. Can't wait to sit and listen on the clock.
TO-DO:
- Finalize marketing outline @ work
- Beg someone to approve the new research page @ work
- Finish the zine + lecture outline
- Find all the missing parts of my cyberdeck lol
Dig through the hard drive for the codebase I wrote for Spirit to cry about- Figure out how to document the last two years worth of 9-5 work
- Attend coworker's webinar May 13 @ 4PM
- Red mary janes come in the mail on wednesday :>
- New gardener starts on May 14
- Substack: How AI sucked at the knowledgebase CMS
- Substack: How AI sucked at writing this blog
- Introduce my copywriter to my fundraising coordinator
- New bookstore
- New turkish restaurant by me
- Start grant writing lmaoooo