markjgsmith

2024/10/09 #

It was a very eventful day yesterday as far as development goes. I got the customizable headers feature working, following quite a big push to get it over the line. It all looked awesome yesterday evening. If the daily build has gone well during the night then there will be another test blog post in amidst yesterday’s writings.

I suppose it might seem like an inconsequential feature, but it’s actually quite profound. Like the beginning of a new phase. The phase where many interesting things become possibilities. The foundations are nearing a place where they are ready to support some bigger feature sets.

As a small step I’m going to try and update the day and blog post header fonts to something a little unnusual, at least by the standards of the website so far.

My hope is that I’m in a place where redesigns are possible. It would be awesome if redesigns were easy, something you could do every year say. The tricky part, the bit I’d like to get right, is I want a setup where redesigns only affect the pages going forward. So whenever you visit a page on the blog, you see it with the style it was originally published with. Like a time capsule.

I’ll have to put more thought into that, there are a lot of edge cases, for instance it makes sense for date based writings like blogging and notes but does it make sense for one off info pages? Probably not. It might not even make sense for the linkblog.

It was a cold night last night. Feeling very cold this morning. Not having any dinner last night didn’t help much, but unfortunatly I’m having to ration massively at the minute. Even one propper meal a day isn’t possible. There are signs things are being setup to blame me for something again.

A butch woman was sitting on a chair near the internet place looking like she was ill yesterday. And then later in the public toilets, a man was apparently passed out in one of the cubicles with a foot sticking out under the door. He had a bag you could see under the door that looked similar to mine. It wouldn’t suprise me one bit if it was part of some plot to convince people I was doing drugs. Similar things have happened many times before.

Whether it’s a full on attempt to do that or just anger goading, there’s definitely something in the works. Straws are still being left in every location I go to. #

Enormous man in shop cafe eating with what can only be described as impressively slob like aplomb informed me with absolute certainty that 'we won'. Having never to my knowledge met or seen this ginormous gentleman before, I feel like the world deserves to know, hence this short post. I wouldn’t want to be the only person alive to be aware of the state of things, whatever things are in this case, I certainly have no idea what he was on about, but it seemed very important to him that I knew. #

cat << EOF > Keen & Teare on innovation in Europe

Another pretty great tech industry discussion between Andrew Keen and Keith Teare in a recent podcast. Lots of topics covered but this one about innovation in Europe stood out. Here’s a quote [23:33]:

AK: It’s bad news for Europe. They are doubly now in jeopardy. They couldn’t keep up with Google and Apple, they’re certainly not going to be able to keep up with OpenAI.

Keith Tear: Yeah it tells you a little bit why regulation is such a big topic there. They are trying to slow it all down.

Another interesting fact, innovation spend per head per year in venture:

  • Europe $55
  • Uk $320
  • US $500

Worse still, of the $55, 60% comes from government, whereas for US 100% comes from the private sector. #

cat << EOF > New heading fonts :)

Following on from the customizable header elements feature that I got working over the past few days, I decided to go ahead and try out some new fonts. These might very well change in the future, but just wanted to at least try something different.

Here’s the CSS if you are curious what they are:

h3 { font-family: Impact, Charcoal, Helvetica Inserat, Bitstream Vera Sans Bold, Arial Black, sans serif; } h4 { font-family: bradley hand, cursive; font-size: 1.17em; }

They are both web safe fonts so should work in all browsers. This stack overflow post about default browser sizes was also useful. #

Today’s links:

For enquiries about my consulting, development, training and writing services, aswell as sponsorship opportunities contact me directly via email. More details about me here.