A collection of thoughts not long enough for a blog post of their own š
6 min read | April 4 2022
Iāve written down so many interesting little topics to write about over the last couple of years but many of them feel like itād be pushing (hard) to make a whole post about them. So instead hereās a round-up! In no particular order.
Google Analytics is bad
And sharky. And takes a lot of info / data on users. And sells it to advertisers. We mostly all know this by now⦠anyway, this site uses no analytics tracking mechanism and uses Commento for comments, which also leaves your personal data alone. Youāre welcome! Security is important and my little internet garden shall not impose on yours.
gatsby-remark-external-links
and gatsby-plugin-catch-links
are awesome
If you run a Gatsby site that includes any markdown-based text, these plugins work to make sure that any links you put in markdown get correctly converted to internal Gatsby Link (component)ās or have the proper rel
attributes assigned if theyāre truly external links! Neato!
āWe like to just use an editor and a CLI, not an IDEā
Hah. I couldnāt help but think this quote is perfect and spot-on after having been a rails developer now for a few years āĀ coming from .NET where (full-fledged) Visual Studio is the standard. It feels really good to be āclose to the command lineā, as it goes. Ruby: a very high level language with developers that prefer low-level habits š.
Why use the canonical www. subdomain anymore?
This is a tricky question full of contextual history āĀ to my current understanding, the www.
prefix became prevalent and important throughout the nineties and early two-thousands as it represented a verbal flag that the person was speaking of an address / place on the internet! The internet was new and unfamiliar to many. We (collectively) understood that āwwwā meant āWorld Wide Webā more than we knew that ā.comā was a suffix for a web address. Thus, the www.
prefix became a clear verbal flag to mean āitās an internet addressā. Or at least, thatās what Iāve learned so far š. Nowadays people verbally (and visually, when written) understand most popular TLDās alone as representing web addresses.
That said, itās still necessary to use a subdomain (any, really) for maximum site performance due to DNS restrictions on CNAMEāing and IP address resolution protocols except in rare cases. If you have to use any subdomain, you might as well use the classic!
To my knowledge, Netlify (when hosting your name-servers) and CloudFlare can escape the performance loss of no-subdomain when configured correctly.
I miss The Tank dearly!
We definitely could not have taken it on our full-time travels and thereās some likelihood that Iāll purchase another mountain bike again in the future⦠but I really did love riding my bike to work that winter! Winter riding, given the right tools, can really be a blast.
Kindles are great!
I shied away from having a digital book platform for a long time āĀ I was worried it just wouldnāt be the same as a physical book and that I wouldnāt like it, or maybe that it didnāt feel genuine? Iām not sure. The e-ink screen is everything. Itās killer. Especially given that weāre traveling now. Tough to beat the form-factor for a million books š!
BetterSnapTool is brilliant!
Finally. The best window movement/management solution for macOS Iāve ever used. I keep all of my windows in the same exact rectangle on the screen all the time. They all sit on top of each other (or hidden) so that Iām only ever looking at one thing at one time (deep work, right?). Getting every window into the same exact spot such that they donāt peek out from behind the next every time I plug my computer into the monitor (or unplug) is a real pain in the rear.
BST allows me to setup a keybinding to automatically jump a window up to the pre-defined position and size (perfectly in place) but also is smart enough to know which monitor (built in or even which external) Iām using and will snap them in the right spot for that monitor. Brilliant. Snappy snappy, friends!
A smaller, closer tribe is better than a big, distant one
The older I grow (and possibly the farther away I get from Facebook, having had >2000 āfriendsā), the more I realize how critical it is to keep your tribe (your āvillageā; the friends around you that you interact with on a week-to-week basis, hopefully often) close, even if itās only a handful of people. The closeness of a village is worth more than its size.
Keep up with the US Flag
Did you know you can sign up to get an email every time the US Flag is declared to be set at half-staff? You sure can! Just sign up at https://www.aflag.com. ā¤ļø you, USA āŗļø.
Do you write really long texts back and forth to people?
The text-message platform can be tricky to keep up with (especially since you canāt mark a message as āunreadā, etc.) āĀ consider that your long-form messages may actually be a great indicator that youāre after a good conversational depth with somebody, but consider changing the platform. Call them! Or better, go for a walk with them and talk it out! Either of these actions is way better for building up the relationship and youāll likely cover far more far faster than youād have possibly been able to via text!
Figure out which hobbies you wonāt monetize
I wish you could do this ahead of time but itās often tricky to realize when something transitions from an activity to a hobby. Anyway, figure out where your lines of monetization are. Keep some things just for your own pleasure and fulfillment. Donāt monetize them. Donāt make a business of them. Keep āem for you. For me itās music. I basically never take money for any of the music I play / shows I do. I play music because I love it. I donāt ever want to monetize it.
Well that was a whole ābunch of random! Cāest la vie!