Weeknotes 25:37

Posted 3 days ago

Week of September 7–13

• As I mentioned in last week’s note, I did not feel well most of that week. It culminated into feeling really bad over the weekend. I decided to take Monday off to get some more rest and recover. I am glad that I did. I was still not feeling great on Tuesday but felt much better as the week went on. I am not sure if I had a cold or sinus infection. I had a really bad sinus headache on Saturday and a bit of one on Sunday.
• Wednesday was “not a fine day for science” as Dexter would say. I was trying to update some WordPress plugins for some of our language sites. I backed up the site on Flywheel before I started and then selected all the plugins to update. And then I got a critical error that brought down the site. When I tried to restore the site from my backup, the site was still down. The fine folks at Flywheel support helped me get the site back up. The person suggested spinning up a staging site and updating the plugins there one at a time to determine the culprit. But I also had trouble getting the staging site to spin up. Another fine folk at Flywheel helped me to get that resolved. So I updated the plugins one by one and found the culprit. Reset the staging environment and updated the other plugins just to make sure. And then I went to update the production site, and one of the other plugins crashed the site. That plugin had updated fine on staging. Frustrating. I decided to let it go and come back to it another time.
• I met with one of our partners who is responsible for the content on one of our language sites. He was having an issue with image quality. We were able to get on a Zoom and he walked me through his process. I was easily able to identify his problem. He was resizing an image in Photoshop without the aspect ratio constraint. Instead of cropping the image to the height he needed, he was compressing the image by resizing it the way that he did. He also had text in the image so the distortion affected that as well. I encouraged him to resize the image first and then add text later. I also showed him Squoosh so that he could optimize his images and encouraged him to use WebP format.
• I spent time throughout the week editing my article for CSS Tricks. On Friday, I realized that I had gotten something wrong about nesting in native CSS. I am glad that I caught it and was able to correct it and revise that section of my article. The article will be published on Wednesday. I am really excited and glad to have one under my belt.

Articles I read

• Red vs Blue (Joe Crawford) – Joe reflects on a Flash game his son made. He made an adaptation with Ruffle Flash Player.
• Dark Mode: How Users Think About It and Issues to Avoid (Tanner Kohler) – I was interested to read this. I have been thinking about the ministry website I work on. Been wondering if we could trade out black for a brand color and still meet the expectations of what dark mode means to users.
• The blissful zen of a good side project (Josh Collinsworth) – I have enjoyed working on a side project to create a personal memory keeper.
• Lessons Learned from Recreating a Styled Dialog (Chris Coyier on Frontend Masters Blog)
• The meaning of life… (Chris Ferdinandi)
• “Why would anybody start a website?” (Dave Rupert)
• More than a checklist: three things that changed how I see accessibility (Yusuf Kandemir) – I love these articles where people share aha moments. I like this one because I feel like I had a similar moment when how I saw accessibility changed and became personal.
• Jordan Peterson’s Achilles Heel (Joel Pelsue)
• I’m Working on an Album (Geoff Graham) – I am excited for Geoff and cannot wait to listen to the finished product.
• Weeknotes 41 (Mark Boulton)
• Enjoying Your Own Decline (Seth Lewis)
• Double Grace (Paul David Tripp)
• The Most Exasperating and Least Rewarding (Tim Challies)
• The Case Against Vasectomies (Haley Baumeister)
• Do less (Chris Ferdinandi)
• Productively Miscellaneous (Joe Crawford)
• Charlie Kirk Is Dead and I am Sad (Sad And Angry) (Stephen McAlpine)
• The Gospel in a Mental Health Crisis (Matthew Hosier)
• How Great the Chasm That Lay Between Us (Samuel James)
• What works for me (Chris Ferdinandi)
• Let’s see Paul Allen’s CSS Reset (David Bushell)
• Charlie Kirk, the Brevity of Life, God’s Sovereignty, and Our Rock-Solid Hope (Randy Alcorn)
• Studio Notes #49 (Dan Cederholm)
• What the Locusts Eat (Karen Wade Hayes)
• Modern CSS vs Sass: New Native Features You Should Use (Waqar Ahmed)
• Goodbye SASS ?, welcome back native CSS (Karsten Biedermann)
• Native CSS Nesting vs. Sass Nesting (Kevin Powell on The Cascade)
• I Blame the Parents (Stephen McAlpine)
• Are patterns and rhythms godly or helpful? (Stephen Kneale)

What I watched

Twenty One Pilots City Walls – My daughter showed us some videos about the Twenty One Pilot lore before we watched City Walls with her. It was her first watch of the video.

• Thor: The Dark World (Disney+)
• The Avengers (Disney+)
• NCIS (Netflix)
• The Great British Baking Show Collection 13, Episode 2 (Netflix)
• No Taste Like Home, Florence Pugh (Disney+)
• Tucci in Italy, Episode 1 (Disney+)
• Project Runway, various episodes (Samsung TV)

What I listened to

• Breach (Twenty One Pilots)

Books I read

• Sunday Matters (Paul David Tripp) – I read one devotional a week.
• Everyday Gospel (Paul David Tripp) – Reading through the Bible this year with this devotional.
• All That Jesus Commanded (John Piper)
• Universal Principles of UX Design (Irene Pereyra)
• To Be a Woman (Katie McCoy)
• Keep Going (Austin Kleon)

Walking

• Monday – 1.76 miles in 34 minutes
• Wedneday – 2.16 miles in 40 minutes

What I played

MLB The Show 20 (Twins) – I went 2-1 this week. I came back from a 7-3 deficit and scored 7 runs in the 7th, 8th, and 9th to beat the WhiteSox on Sunday. The Dodgers came back and beat me 10-8 on Monday. I had a throwing error that would have been the final out of the game but opened the door for LA to score three runs in the ninth and beat me.