08 May 2025
I usually try to write these blog posts on a weekend, but with the long weekend and being quite busy throughout it I've had to write this mid-week instead. The long weekend was filled with trips to the garden centre, trips to birthday parties and trips to the football. The trip to the football was the one I probably enjoyed the least, it's hard being a supporter sometimes.
Our solar panels were fully enabled last week and the sunny weather has meant all the graphs were looking good for producing more than we were consuming. Now that things are a bit more overcast the graphs are looking... less good. We don't really mind that, though, we got the panels to reduce our reliance on the grid and to be more eco-friendly. From what I've heard you don't really make that much money selling back to the grid, but sending a bit less money to the electrical supplier is no bad thing.
Last week I had a quite involved conversation with my partner where I insisted that I was using "grid" layout in the CSS for this website, only to find out I'm actually not. I am using some CSS statements that made me think that I was using it - but I actually wasn't. I think the way that CSS and HTML is so forgiving, so even if you specify something incorrect it would produce something that was correct, is probably what confounds software developers about it. It's actually a huge positive, but obviously if you compare them to programming languages where if it isn't correct it won't compile, then I can see why some developers are so confused by web technologies.
This blog post has now been written over two days, with some delicious homemade rhubard crumble to push me over the line, courtesy of my amazing partner. She shared with me some very fun indie websites that have me envious and inspired. I'd like to first redesign the CSS on this website to make full use of grid layout, and maybe even grid templates if I can figure them out, and then do a bit of a redesign of the site structure. I don't seem to have much time these so maybe even that is ambitious - but if not then making it a bit more silly and fun would be a nice target. Lots for me to look forward to, I think!
29 Apr 2025
I hadn't really intended this blog to become a "week notes", but I can't say I'm against it. This blog is a little late, on account of a hellish Saturday evening that had me working until 4:30am. Sunday is a blur.
I had thought this blog would have more technical content in it, but I've found my thoughts drawn to other things. A little while ago in Brighton a had a "mulberry crumble". An unbelievably delicious dessert, that started off a minor obsession myself and my partner with mulberries. The first thing to know is that, despite the nursery rhyme, mulberries grow on trees rather than bushes. They aren't native to our shores, but were brought here to try to stiumulate a silk trade as silkworms enjoy mulberry trees.
That effort did not pay off, and unfortunarely a lot of mulberry trees died with their efforts. But in a way mulberry trees have been following me and my partner for a while. Nearby Charlton became the centre of a lot of mulberry tree growing, and there are great mulberry trees to see at Charlton House, Greenwich University's Dreadnought Building at Lesnes Abbey.
There is a huge amount of information on London's mulberry trees on the fantastic Morus Londinium website. They even have a map to find your nearest mulberry tree! One of the most impressive features I've seen of black mulberry trees is there ability to completely grow back, even if cut right back into a stump. You can read more about these "phoenix trees" here. I do wish I had the resiliency of a mulberry tree.
One sort-of tech related thing I can say about last week is how I fear that AI might mean a sharp downturn in the quality of documentation. Let's face it: not all open source projects have great documentation as it is. But I had a situation over the weekend where what appeared to be a very simple setup that should have been just a straightforward change to configuration became a drawn-out battle between human and software.
The documentation included no examples, and the tutorials in the documentation created a configuration that the software complained was deprecated. The only way I found to get it to work was to bash it through a bunch of GitHub Copilot prompts until it worked. That's a terrible experience. I don't really want to support AI, I want to learn for myself, but and if the documentation is so bad I'm forced to turn to AI then I think that is an indictment of the documentation.
Unfortunately, I fear developers will neglect documentation even more if the expectation is that an AI can figure it out for you. Why bother to create a useful set of documentation with tutorials, references and how-tos if nobody will bother reading it and instead will get an AI to explain it to them instead? Are we just writing documentation for the consumption of robots now?
21 Apr 2025
I thought I might make a short blog post outlining both how I made this website and also talking about my week. Both are cases of me "tending to my garden", metaphorically mostly, but actually literally over the Easter bank holiday weekend as I helped my partner get the garden in shape and take the first steps towards what I'm sure will be an abundent tomato harvest.
In the spirit of tending to my garden (metaphorically) I've been trying to move more and get into better habits. I needn't really have put much energy towards trying to form better fitness habits - it turns out gardening is (literally) great exercise. The new Bon Iver album arrived via my post box on Wednesday and I've been very much enjoying "SABLE, fABLE" - as much as it feels like a "goodbye" from one of my favourite artists. A lot of the lyrics are resonating with me, but the one that is hitting me the hardest right now is "that January ain’t the whole world". I'm holding that with me.
I did promise to reveal a little about how I made this website so now I will share. As I have mentioned previously, I am using Zola as a static site generator. The theme is very loosely based on the "Coder" Hugo theme but I've made a LOT of changes to fit my needs. The markdown and configuration is held in a GitHub repository that is hooked up to Cloudflare Pages, so that the site is built whenever I push via Git. It's a nice, clean workflow!
I've tried to make the whole website without any Javascript, both because I don't like writing it and also because I think there's enough features in HTML and CSS that I don't really need it. The mobile navigation "burger menu" uses a cool technique with a toggle and some nice CSS to get it to display as a menu. The only issue with it's current iteration is the icon is made with just unicode characters that kind of look like burger menu icons, I'd like to change those to SVGs at some point.
I really wanted to make sure that any code snippets (such as the one on the Lisdex page) would look nice, without using any Javascript. Luckily a little while ago I found a blog post that discussed using a font file with built-in syntax highlighting. That fit the bill perfectly, and with some help from my (web developer) partner I was able to get the code snippets to scroll on mobile. I had similar issues with tables not scrolling on mobile that I was able to resolve with the same overflow: scroll; statement.
I'm still learning everything that is possible with Zola and one frustration I had was that I couldn't seem to figure out how to print the current year to the page. I settled on setting the year as a variable in a config file that could be read in. Yuck! Just today I was browsing around the Zola documentation when I found a link to the templating engine they were using, Tera, and there I found a snippet to do exactly what I wanted. I realise I would still need to update my website in Zola to keep the year current but ideally I would be updating the website regularly, having this would just be one less thing to remember.
I've also created a new favicon, but I'm quite bad at anything artistic so I had to find some images of cowboy hats and gophers and trace them onto a piece of paper that I then scanned in. I'd like to say it's deliberately bad, rather than just bad.
I don't really have a sign off from this post so for now I will repeat: tend to your garden.