Weeknotes 25:29

Posted 3 days ago

Week of July 13–19

I happened upon a video about one of my articles

I was watching Salma Alam-Naylor’s Why “Women in Tech” is not enough on Thursday morning. At the end of the video, YouTube played a Kevin Powell video. I soon realized that Kevin was referencing a question that I had asked on Bluesky in June:

Jeff Bridgforth

@jeffbridgforth.com

Has anyone come up with a trick to make the width of a figure element fit the content of contained image even when figcaption has more width? I want figcaption to wrap. @kevinpowell.co @bell.bz @ishadeed.com @michelleb.bsky.social @chriscoyier.net @5t3ph.bsky.social

Kevin gives a breakdown of the solutions proposed by an all-star lineup of CSS experts that I documented last month. I enjoyed getting Kevin’s take on the different solutions. I love how Bluesky has reconnected me to the Web community in a way that I had experienced on Twitter in the past. Kevin references my article several times in the video and linked to it in the description.

Roadtrip

I took an unplanned road trip on Sunday. It was my third trip in the last five weeks. I went up to Nashville to pick up my daughter and her guinea pigs and bring them to Chattanooga. My daughter was visiting to help out as a coach for a homeschool Shakespeare group.

I listened to The Big Web Show episode about Responsive Web Design that I wrote about earlier in the month. It was fun to revisit it and think about how many things we are still wrestling with. I found it laughable that a big deal was made about a 4 MB site (Jon Hicks) when compared to the behemoths we have today.

I also listened to a couple of chapters of Understanding Prayer on Spotify. I would like to read the book in the near future. I enjoyed sharing some stories with her on the return trip to Chattanooga. It was great having her home for the week and I liked the company of her guinea pigs in my “summer office.” Just don’t tell Teddy, my youngest daughter’s guinea pig, that I said that.

My summer office, one floor below my actual office. I have spent the past month working from here due to various house guests.

Other miscellaneous things about the week

  • It was Shakespeare Camp week in our house. My wife directed A Winter’s Tale. This was her first time to direct a play after serving as a coach for many years. Both of my daughters were involved, with one serving as a coach and the other as stage manager and choreographer. It was a busy week for them and the house was very quiet for me. We attended the show on Friday and the kids did a great job. I am very proud of my wife and glad she had this opportunity to use her gifts and talents and invest in these young people.
  • I woke up on Tuesday not feeling well. I had to cough any time I took a deep breath. My first concern was having COVID. Not a good week to have it with the Shakespeare camp. I didn’t want to get anyone else sick. I was relieved to test negative for it. I took the day off to rest and went to the MinuteClinic later in the day. They believe I had an upper respiratory infection. I recovered quickly and was able to work the rest of the week.
  • I tried to write some thoughts on AI. I have read a lot of articles and been thinking about my own stance toward using the technology. I have read several other people’s AI statements and would like to be able to put together my own. I was hoping that writing my thoughts in an article would help me to begin to solidify my thoughts and feelings about the subject. But I hit a wall and things were just not flowing out. It was a bit frustrating to not be able to get through a first draft.
  • I worked on a lot of different small tasks for our main site, our Spanish site, and our French site, which we are in the process of moving into Django CMS.
  • I continue to work on my side project of building my own personal memory keeper. I add memories each day from Facebook and add other photos, both digital and ones I scan. I have enjoyed reliving a lot of fun times from my previous summers in Hungary.
I had dinner with my son on Saturday night. We tried out a new Mexican restaurant close to our house. The food and the service was excellent and I plan to go back in the future.

Inspired by

Web Dev Conference (WDC) – I love the bold colors and the execution of a concept. It functions like a desktop on a computer. You can move the windows around on the page and “close” them. Once you clos the window, an icon will appear in the bottom left of the “screen” and you can reopen the window from that. I also like the us of “Clippy” to show testimonials about the conference. I thought about the site later in the week when my son showed me the design idea he is working on for his portfolio. He was planning to have windows and I showed him this site as possible inspiration for the interactions on his site.

Wondermake – I like the clean look of this site with some subtle animations added in that give it some nice personality. I tend to like more subtle animations. I like the logo reveal as you scroll next to the menu icon. I like the simple text reveals. And I like that they did not animate everything on the page. Nice work.

Articles I read

What I watched

Biblical Framework for Understanding and Using AI – John Dyer (YouTube)

Why “Women in Tech” is not enough – Salma Alam-Naylor (YouTube)

How to ignore an element’s size (and why you want to) – Kevin Powell (YouTube) – I already mentioned watching this video earlier in the post.

Carrot Clarinet – Linsey Pollack (YouTube)

Grid auto-fit, but with even number of columns only – Kevin Powell (YouTube)

Books I am reading

Walking

Beautiful sky on my Monday evening walk
  • Monday – 1.43 miles in 27 minutes
  • Wednesday – 1.45 in 28 minutes

What I played

MLB The Show 20 (Twins) – I went 5-1 in games I played this week.

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