Everything and Nothing
When the pandemic hit and nobody could travel anywhere, I, like many others, found connections through Zoom calls. I had multiple scheduled calls with different groups: a daily morning call, a weekly Friday call, two board game groups, a poker night, a Call of Duty group, and semi-regular calls with various individuals. I am very grateful for the friends I have made over the years and that those…
Hey, it’s the inaugural post for the RSS Club on Snook.ca! I was working away on my site, adding content that I thought might be relevant to some, like an AI statement and a privacy policy. Most people probably don’t care but for those that do, it’s there and it shows that I care about those things, too. I never really had a name for these types of one-off pages but I came across slash pages and…
I've seen Dave Rupert do posts that only appear in the RSS feed. He called it the RSS Club . In his words, It’s like a newsletter delivered to your feed reader to celebrate the medium of RSS and breakaway from social media. I like that ethos and am choosing to do the same. What posts will qualify as part of the RSS Club remains to be seen. Maybe they'll be more personal. Maybe they'll cover topics…
We’re into the thick of summer and the days have been long and hot—just the way I like it. Pushing the One and Only Edge Back in March , I mentioned having some ideas but wanting at least one edge to push. Turns out, the only edge I pushed was using scroll-based animations. Dullest edge pushing ever. I did the bare minimum and what do you know, I’m happy with it. I’m happy to have the new design,…
I am a cocktail and four wines in as we step out into the cool autumn night after a hefty dinner. My sweater and the alcohol and her hand will keep me warm on the walk back. “The directions say to turn right here,” she says, as we stand in front of a church that caps the street. I recognize the church from earlier in the day. “Yes, but we can go left,” I redirect. She follows along, her hand still…
A decade ago, when I was still speaking at conferences and heavily marketing myself, I’d often think of personal branding ideas. We’ve seen the trends. The business cards. The t-shirts. The stickers. The buttons. The socks! Can’t forget the socks. My logo is branded across not only my sites but my computers and my slide decks, too. I also liked using colour to reinforce my brand. I’ve continued…
In 1985, at the age of eleven, I bought my first comic book: The Transformers #9. From there, I went on to collect nearly a thousand comics over my teenage years, mostly in the Marvel universe like Spider-Man and X-men. Lots of Groo the Wanderer (which my mom always enjoyed) and then into stuff like Watchmen and The Sandman. Bill Sienkiewicz was one of my favourite artists with his work on The New…
I came across this fun little comic titled We Didn’t Lose the Plot . It has a straightforward conclusion: more things should come to an end. The “things” referred to here is media like books and movies and television but I’d extend it to many other things as well. Like web projects. So often, things are built in the attempt to have infinite growth. And like cancer, they seemingly grow to the point…
One thing I like about 11ty is that common tasks for development oriented blogs are easily handled and syntax highlighting is no exception. I installed the Syntax Highlighting Plugin just like the documentation asked me to. Then, I had to modify my code blocks in my blog post Markdown files to indicate what language they were. Thankfully, I had only written two articles so far that contained code…
When I was building this site, I was keeping it lean but perhaps a bit messy. It’s not a big complex site and I didn’t need to write CSS to maintain a big complex site. As such, I even wondered if I’d stick to any kind of naming convention. Old habits are hard to break and I found anytime I tried to get away with just element selectors for something, it was clunky as I continued to iterate. Sure…