Minimum viable personal website.
Dark modes and themes? Isn’t that what we were all doing when we were first cooped up at home in 2020? Well, yes, but it’s still relevant today, and browsers have some hot new stuff that can make dealing with this a lot easier. This post is going to be pretty Apple-focused because, well, that’s what I know. Still, Apple is absolutely a a driver of all this, so it makes sense to put them at the…
I wanted to check one little thing in the AP Stylebook, and now I’m writing a blog post. I’ll try to make this quick. The hardest part about using the printed AP Stylebook is that you have to remember what they call things. For example, if you’re looking up how to format a range of dates, well good luck . The information you need might be under dates, numbers, punctuation, or some completely other…
I’m working on a ton of updates to this site right now. Some of these are pretty big (notice the theme picker up top?), and others are smaller, quality-of-life improvements. I launched the Eleventy version of this site in 2019 , when the project was still in its relative infancy, and a lot has changed since then. One of these is the addition of Computed Data , which dropped over a year after I…
Oh cool, it’s 2023 and running your own site is suddenly cool again, and not at all weird. Well that’s neat. I realize I haven’t written anything in like ten months, but in my defense, I had an exceptionally shitty year. On top of enduring a multitude of tragedies, I’ve been absolutely crushed by work for the last seven or eight months. I’m burnt out. I actually have a long list of things I want…
A year ago (well, 364 days ago), I wrote that it looked like the end was in sight. Turns out it was really just beginning. I’ll give myself a little bit of credit: It sort of ended, before it really started. A year ago, I was just about three weeks out from my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. It was pretty great. By the end of April, I was fully vaccinated. Vaccinations were skyrocketing and…
All the way back in August , I started working on some improvements to this site. Things had gotten busy and it had been a good while since I’d posted anything. I’ve got a lot of ideas saved up, and so I wanted to rectify that. But before I committed to more content, I wanted to get things right under the hood. I keep up religiously with the latest Eleventy news, and I wanted to get ready for the…
So here I am, in the middle of completely rebuilding this site under the hood, when I went and broke something completely unrelated. I might get ambitious and fix it, but the rebuild is just about done, and I’d rather just put my effort there this point. So what am I working on? Well I’ve been excited to start doing more writing, but my build times on this site are painfully slow. This was my…
I think the first time I ever heard of Covid-19 was this viral thread . I didn’t pay it much mind, and I didn’t hear much more about it for the next week or so. It sounded bad, but it was in China, and not really something we would have to worry about. It sounded like it would be another SARS, which got a lot of news coverage, and then… well, I’m not really sure. It went away, at any rate. On this…
This has been the longest four years of my life. Somehow, it was also the shortest. Every day brought some fresh horror, and yet it was all a blur. I’m glad it’s almost over, but nothing will be normal again for a very long time.
MF DOOM is dead . There are very few artists I listened to in the heyday of this site more than MF DOOM. He was one of those artists that I found at the exact right point in my life to fully appreciate. I moved to the New York area in December of 2005. I was 26 years old at the time. The next month I saw MF Doom live at the Nokia Theatre in Times Square. While the concert was fantastic, I don’t…
In 2008, Republicans couldn’t think of anything worse than to call somebody a terrorist, and so, after much thoughtful deliberation, they decided it would be best for the country if that’s what they called Obama. Years passed, and many a terrorist fist jab later, it turned out that our nation’s turnip fields were not beset with the predicted wave upon wave of 9/11s. The terrorist label eventually…
I’ve been thinking political lately . And by lately, I mean for the last four years. Holy shit, it’s been a ride. But for a few months, I’ve had a particular post I’ve been working on mostly in my head, and now, less than an hour before the polls start closing, I’m finally slapping it together. Donald Trump is no political genius. In fact, he’s one of the dumbest motherfuckers we’ve ever seen.…
I have some quick thoughts on The Mandalorian Season 2 that I need to get out of my brain before Chapter 9 is released in a few hours. Caution: There may be spoilers ahead. Din’s quest In on of the season 2 trailers , The Mandalorian , who we’ve learned is named Din Djarin, says “I’ve been quested to bring this one back to his kind.” In season 1, The Armorer tells Din about the Jedi, who the…
Quick, without googling it, are the west coast wildfires still happening? Answer: As of today, they seem to be largely under control. It’s OK, I didn’t know either. I’m glad things have improved, because they’ve completely dropped out of the news cycle, and without any resolution. The biggest clue that things had improved comes from the fact that we haven’t been seeing any more of the dramatic…
One of the things not specifically related to Trump that has driven me nuts these last few years is the rehabilitation of George W. Bush. In the run up to the 2004 election, it was impossible to imagine a worse president. We’re now nearly 20 years into his first war—almost half my life. The second war is technically over, but it’s been rippling ever since, and that’s the one that we thought would…
I wrote 800 words and deleted all of it. Not that anybody much reads my musings on things, but I realized nobody needs to read it. It was helpful to get my thoughts in order, but instead I’m going to make this short, and try to do more listening and less writing about my own thoughts on the subject. I’m incredibly heartened by the protests fighting for Black Lives. These are very dark times, but I…
I don’t throw anything digital away. Sure, I lose stuff all the time, but for the most part I’m a digital pack rat. In the early days of this site, I had a good sense that I wanted to pursue some form of working on web sites as a career, but I actually had very little to go on other than some skill working with HTML and eventually CSS. Beyond that, the actual business of making a web site was more…
I’m really doing it this time. I’m maintaining this site again. The way I say this, you might think I had just a little lapse and I’m getting back on track. Not exactly. The real truth here is that I had two good years with this site. I launched this site as a blog just days before I graduated from college. I updated daily-ish — often even more frequently than that — for months. Eventually I ran…
I couldn’t just start posting again. Believe me, I wanted to. A month and a half ago , I mentioned two things that I wanted to do with this site: Write about old video games and maybe switch to Forestry . Well, it took a while, but I did put together a tedious post about Track & Field II . It was more work than I care to admit, but I did it and I’m proud of it. As for switching the CMS on this…
It’s no secret that there were some not-so-great NES games. Standards were different back in the day, and we didn’t exactly have a lot to choose from. Even making the cover of Nintendo Power was hardly a guarantee of quality or that a game would become a beloved classic. When I had the idea to write this series, I knew it was only a matter of time until I started running into the clunkers. I was…
Update 4/29/2020: A whole bunch of updates inline below! Update 5/26/2020: Even more updates Overall, I grade the current global pandemic an F. It’s not good! That’s not to say that there aren’t silver linings. Like a lot of people, I’m getting things done. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the good, the bad, and the inane things I’ve stopped putting off, as well as the things I have yet to stop…
I started this site back up a little over a year ago. I posted a bunch of really, really long things, then they got shorter. Then they got more and more intermittent. Then I posted a few photos. Then well, not much. The last three and a half years have been, let’s say, eventful. And that’s led to a certain amount of stress for anybody who has even the slightest inkling of the world around them. I…
I’ve really been loving Netlify’s entire platform ever since I finally dove into it earlier this year when I rebuilt this site. Since this site went live in March, I’ve also started using Netlify for some work-related projects. My work projects require something a little more involved than just a personal blog needs to be. To build these sites, I need to make connections between different data…
At work we run a program whose marketing materials are heavily hexagon-based. I really like the overall look of the marketing materials, but when it came time to translate that into a web design and site, things got difficult . Hexagons are a pain in the ass. Everything on the web is based around squares and rectangles. Things naturally want to align at the top and bottom, left and right. But not…
After a re-listen, I am prepared to state that Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness does not hold up. For something they tried to sell as the return of the concept album, it’s just an incredibly disjointed collection of songs. There are enough highlights that they could have assembled a pretty good normal-length album, though it would have still felt disjointed. It’s just so weird that Gish and…
There’s a very long list of video games that I’ve picked up, played for an hour or so, and then got either completely bored or frustrated with. Some of these are games that many people really seem to love. Maybe it’s a product of the fact that video games were expensive, and most kids those days just had to make do with the few games we had. Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest may be at the top of this…
Spoiler alert! There are some spoilers for Avengers: Endgame in last two paragraphs. I have created a graphic illustrating the definitive order for watching the movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I’ll spoil it for you: It’s the release order. I came across a garbage image from a Facebook page. Rather than give shitty Facebook pages what they want, and “engage” on that terrible platform, I’m…
Super Mario Bros. 2 was the first game that I remember being a big deal for me to get. I got it in the spring of 1989, either as a gift for Easter or First Holy Communion — I don’t remember which. I do remember that I had to share it with my sisters, so it was really only one-third mine. It’s been almost exactly 30 years, so I’m forgiving myself for the shaky memory. As I started planning to write…
I didn’t have a lot of video games growing up. I had the important ones — all of the Mario games — but I never had a huge collection. Getting a new video game was a big event, and as best I can remember, I only ever owned ten games for the NES. Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt Town & Country Surf Designs: Wood & Water Rage Blaster Master Zelda II: The Adventure of Link Super Mario Bros. 2 Super Mario…
I may have jumped the gun the other day when I said this isn’t a Star Wars fansite, but there have been developments . The Star Wars Celebration is wrapping up in Chicago right now, and the big event today was the panel for The Mandalorian . They released a few photos, but they also screened a sizzle reel , a teaser trailer , and five minutes from an episode . Enjoy these links while you can.…
Nobody asked for yet another breakdown of the Episode IX trailer, but I have thoughts , and a platform, so here we go. And just because I can, I’m going to toss in some wild speculation for free. There will be no one to stop me this time. First, it’s interesting that the teaser gives almost no indication of the plot. Anybody who’s breaking down this trailer and applying too much meaning to any of…
In the early days of the web, people just made web pages. There were no social networks, and the closest equivalents of the time — forums, chat rooms, IRC, etc. — weren’t really platforms for creative expression, but places for people to meet and connect. If you wanted to express yourself, you had to build a personal site, and the giant in this space was GeoCities. There were others like…
This is a not-so-deep dive into what went into relaunching this site. Despite being well over 4,000 words long, it’s not a comprehensive how-to, but a broad collection of pointers with some notes along the way. It turned out a lot longer than I expected, but it should serve as a good clearinghouse for how I built this site, should anyone ever be curious enough to ask. I could have probably written…
One of my top goals while rebuilding this site was to put all of my content into Markdown. The benefit of Markdown as a storage format is that it’s effectively infinitely portable and reusable, should a new CMS or static site generator come along. The downside is that, out of the box, Markdown doesn’t provide a lot of control over the output. Sure, it’s perfectly valid to write HTML inside of…
Content from before the internet existed is generally well documented, but there’s always gaps in the transition periods. As new media formats appear, so must we develop the tools and methods to archive and store them. The oldest books are mostly gone, but we eventually figured it out. The same goes for newspapers: Virtually everything the New York Times ever published is available online . Early…
I’ve been using the internet in some form or another for over 25 years . I didn’t really take to it in earnest until 1996, and I didn’t put anything serious of my own out there until 1997, but that still leaves 22 years for a lot of crap to pile up. Yesterday I mentioned that I’m working on an a reorganization of my digital life. Since none of what I’ve produced over the years takes up any…
The latest relaunch of this site has got me thinking: Who is Illtron? I think it’s safe to say I was the first to stake a claim on this nom de internet . The name I’ve travelled under online for the longest time is freshyill, which itself has a silly, but straightforward origin story: I needed an AIM screen name. I was on ICQ a lot longer than I was on AIM. It was actually something like a year…
Back in 2013, I rewatched every episode of The Simpsons in my collection of DVD rips. Super cuts were a big thing that year, so I had the bright idea to watch for Troy McClure and make one of my own. The video started making the rounds, but it really blew up after the AV Club picked it up . It racked up about 700,000 views on YouTube before it got taken down. Even though it felt like fair use, I…
We’ve been over this before, but here we are again. I started this site on July 31, 2002 — three days before I graduated from college. For the record, I beat Daring Fireball by two whole weeks (quality wise, let’s say I’m a close second). The look that started it all I had been making web sites for myself and others for six years before I started this site. Up until then, I bounced around between…
Do you know who doesn’t care about how technologically impressive your website is? Literally every one of your users. Users don’t care about Javascript libraries. They don’t care about an unparalleled developer experience. They don’t care about your business objectives, KPIs, or technical architecture. Users care about getting their shit done . Do more of what users want from you. Make these…
I do user experience, product, content, and all kinds of touchy-feely things that make digital experiences usable for humans. Oh, and I also write code, mostly front-end. This is the latest iteration of my website, which went online July 27, 2002. It was previously built with WordPress. Before that, it was on MovableType and TypePad. Now it’s built with a Stupid Static Site Generator that I made.…
I made a responsive off-canvas navigation that’s easy to implement and doesn’t require much in the way of additional markup. The bulk of the display styles are separated in the SCSS, so you don’t have to worry about stripping out a bunch of display styles that you almost certainly don’t want. One of these days I might get around to making some fancier options for it, but this gets the job done for…
This time of year, for the past three years, my good friend Beth and I have been producing a fun little web site called The Yule Blog . It started out as a Twitter account to post interesting facts about Christmas, and snowballed (ugh, puns) into this. I missed writing, but since writing consistently is hard, we decided that if we could focus on one subject and limit ourselves to just part of the…
I used a little bit of Sass on this one. I’m trying to think of how a mixin could simplify this, but it seems like it’ll be a lot of manual labor no matter what I do. I’m not sure what’s up, but something weird is going on with CodePen’s iframe. The animation isn’t working right. It works fine locally and over at CodePen. Oh well. See the Pen
No images were harmed in the making of this pixel guy. I know everybody and his brother has already done something like this, but I just wanted to try it for fun since it’s not a super practical thing. See the Pen
You know, I just checked, and Compass does include something like this. Oh well. Compass splits the difference between this mixin and the one I posted the other day. Compass is built for reusability within any project, and not to be changed — just used. This one is built to be used within my project, where the mixin, not outside variables, defines my default colors. If I want to reuse it, I’ll…
This could probably use a little more work, but it’s heading in the right direction. See the Pen
I needed a mixin for links, so I made this . I want to be able to have linked headings look just like normal headings, without inheriting the color for standard links. For example, for standard links, I’ll include this: a { @include links ; } Since I don’t want my headings to stand out as links, I’ll do this for them: h1 a { @include links ( $link : #222 , $visited : #222 ) ; } To break this down…
Introducing the 1140px Responsive Sass Grid ! Take a look at the grid columns and a few example layouts . Both pages include a column and breakpoint overlay that will help you get an idea of how it functions. I know what you’re thinking … “great, yet another grid system.” Yeah, well you’re probably right. Here’s the thing: I don’t think there’s any one perfect CSS grid system, so it’s important to…
Smart people head to Down for Everyone or Just Me when they can’t reach a website. But who has time for all that typing? Certainly not me. That’s why I took 45 seconds and created a bookmarklet to make this easier. Most people have no idea what a bookmarklet is. The mere idea of editing a bookmark’s address doesn’t even seem to register with them. Me, I’m not like most people. You should be more…