James Thinks Out Loud

Thoughts

  1. Fuck
  2. Background SVGs

    Playing around with really hero-ing the svgs for thoughts, I wanted to try and overlay the content on the generated image.

    Having just sorted inline SVGs which are my general preference as they are highly flexible with CSS I started to play with absolute positioning as a means to to put the content on the image.

    This started to work but as at least one of the els needed removing from the flow it mean more magic numbers and hacks were needed to get the content to reflow at different viewport sizes.

    With all the recent learning and hacking on eleventy config it was not hard (today) to adjust a custom shortcode to output the inline SVG as base64 and use this as a background-image data uri.

    Once I had the SVG as a background it was much simpler to set the desired spacing on the content and defer the flow to the browser.

    Hat tip to this 2015 CSS tricks article: 09: SVG with Data URIs.

  3. Inline SVGs

    I got inline SVGs working this morning. I smashed around Eleventy as I couldn't figure out some of the more recent techniques.

    I ended up with an async shortcode that just read the file off the filesystem and echoed it out.

    I got around to reading the bare minimum about svg viewboxes and figured out a quick crop and reset of width and height attribs.

    I could go back to the SVG generation, but I've got enough to keep moving forward.

  4. ssh fail

    Exploring deploying updates via ssh/scp, etc to not need a whole docker image build 😵‍💫

    it seems the image I'm using to host the site is super lean so no ssh server. kinda great but It needs some further investigation.

  5. Small updates

    One pomodoro in for the day and starting to look at CSS

    • Eleventy comes with very little, not too much to reset.
    • I might bring in something like https://picocss.com/
    • I went looking for what the Prisim css that is currently being included is for turns out it is a code block syntax highlighter. So I'll leave it.

    I got my heading font in and I adjusted the build to use an included CSS file over inlining to each file.

    Time for a break.

  6. Motivation

    I'm looking for motivation to look for work.

    So I finally googled Pomodoro Technique and forced myself to start a timer.

    As a form of internal resistance instead of starting a rubric for my next role I used the first Pomodoro to deploy my website I've been building to production.

  7. Personal Site todos
    1. Can I find a simple markdown/file writer/editor form that I can configure to author posts?
    2. Explore a generative pattern that is seeded from the post content.
    3. Build a post thumb nail generator based on the pattern generated.
    4. Can I configure 11ty to have multiple rss feeds?
    5. Do I want to bring in the heading font I have?
  8. 11ty and static assets over time

    I wonder how Eleventy deals with sites that grow over time.

    It feels like it is independent of the static site generation and is more a concern of syncing/uploading the site.

    I've used sync on S3 successfully to reduce uploads for sites with minor diffs, but I'll need to look into what I'll need to do with my current fly.io setup as it will probably be a whole docker image being uploaded.

  9. Personal site build update 1

    After a few false starts I've got something working that feels like it will serve the IA I've been after.

    Goals I've been thinking about for this site.

    • #james-thinks-out-loud / working title "Thoughts" is somewhere between tweets and stream of consciousness
    • Posts are probably more considered and maybe have some copy editing.
    • Bare bones authoring tools to make it easy to update
    • Static site because who wants to run a DB these days.

    Behind the scenes I've got a staging environment and a production environment, more relevant to development of the site than content updates but still nice to have.

    My existing (now previous) site was an absolute place holder. Now I'm looking for something that I can post updates to and syndicate them out to social media if it makes sense.

    It feels like owning your own content is more important in 2024 than any time that may have come before.

    This is a base blog build using the Eleventy 3.0.0 alpha/beta/nightly what evs. I'm kinda jazzed that Zac got it to ESM.