I’ve written down so many interesting little topics to write about over the last couple of years but many of them feel like it’d be pushing (hard) to make a whole post about them. So instead here’s 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. You’re 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)‘s or have the proper rel attributes assigned if they’re truly external links! Neato!

“We like to just use an editor and a CLI, not an IDE”

Hah. I couldn’t help but think this quote is perfect and spot-on after having been a rails developer now for a few years — coming from .NET where (full-fledged) Visual Studio is the standard. It feels really good to be ‘close to the command line’, as it goes. Ruby: a very high level language with developers that prefer low-level habits 😉.

Why use the canonical www. subdomain anymore?

This is a tricky question full of contextual history — 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 ‘www’ meant ‘World Wide Web’ more than we knew that ‘.com’ was a suffix for a web address. Thus, the www. prefix became a clear verbal flag to mean “it’s an internet address”. Or at least, that’s what I’ve learned so far 😉. Nowadays people verbally (and visually, when written) understand most popular TLD’s alone as representing web addresses.

That said, it’s still necessary to use a subdomain (any, really) for maximum site performance due to DNS restrictions on CNAME’ing 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 there’s some likelihood that I’ll 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 — I was worried it just wouldn’t be the same as a physical book and that I wouldn’t like it, or maybe that it didn’t feel genuine? I’m not sure. The e-ink screen is everything. It’s killer. Especially given that we’re traveling now. Tough to beat the form-factor for a million books 😆!

BetterSnapTool is brilliant!

Finally. The best window movement/management solution for macOS I’ve 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 I’m only ever looking at one thing at one time (deep work, right?). Getting every window into the same exact spot such that they don’t 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) I’m 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 ‘friends’), the more I realize how critical it is to keep your tribe (your ‘village’; the friends around you that you interact with on a week-to-week basis, hopefully often) close, even if it’s 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. ❤️ you, USA ☺️.

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 can’t mark a message as ‘unread’, etc.) — consider that your long-form messages may actually be a great indicator that you’re 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 you’ll likely cover far more far faster than you’d have possibly been able to via text!

Figure out which hobbies you won’t monetize

I wish you could do this ahead of time but it’s 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. Don’t monetize them. Don’t make a business of them. Keep ‘em for you. For me it’s music. I basically never take money for any of the music I play / shows I do. I play music because I love it. I don’t ever want to monetize it.

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Well that was a whole ‘bunch of random! C’est la vie!