I used to use system fonts for my blog theme, but I rethought this decision and converted to the following font-family in my CSS:
font-family: sans-serif; Right, that’s just sans-serif. This should choose the default sans serif font, which is configurable in most browsers.
By choosing sans-serif only, I give the reader the option to decide for themselves which font to choose. If I use the system fonts, I ignore the user’s preferences and force a specific font on them, which they may not have set as default for good reasons.
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It is interesting to look at code not only from the content aspect, but also from the appearance. The appearance of code can give hints how to refactor it.
Beyond the mere visual aspect of code, the shape of a piece of code can carry information by itself. Being able to decipher this information allows to glean indications about the code at a glance, even before starting to read it.
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“It’s about time you try Linux.” is a nice little site listing a few Linux distribution options for beginners (and also more advanced users) and explaining why you should try Linux.
I use Linux less because it’s open source and free software (although that’s a bonus point too), but more because I thinks it’s more user friendly. Installation is fast and simple, updates don’t take ages, I don’t need to crawl the web to find software installers, it isn’t full of bloatware, it runs great on most (even older) hardware etc.
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One thing which I have never looked more closely at, but which I think is very interesting, are “Serverless Functions”, although they are not so serverless because they run on a server. Whatever. On Hacker News, I found a GitHub repository and an article about it.
With fassd, it’s easy (and possible without Kubernetes) to install a runtime for serverless functions on a single server. Sort of like Lambda from Amazon, but open source and self-hosted.
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There was a discussion on Hacker News the other day about whether blogs are dead or not.
I think that there are still many blogs, more than you could ever read. (You can find some of them in my blogroll.) What is different today is that blogs are harder to find. Sure, sometimes when you search for something specific on Google, you find blogs too, but most blogs are more likely to be found via links or aggregators (Hacker News, Lobste.
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Yesterday evening I hinted that I will give my blog a new design in the next days. I woke up relatively early today and thought that I could just finish it quickly now.
My goals were on the one hand to simplify the design significantly, but on the other hand to save as much HTML and CSS as possible.
Now the page should load even faster than it did before. Almost every page on this blog (except the ones with images) uses less than 10 KB for transfer.
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It’s crazy how quickly time can pass when you get very engrossed in something. When it grabs you and you forget almost everything around you. When you’re in the flow.
Today I experienced such a situation again. Inspired by a lot of “minimal classless CSS frameworks” (like this one) I thought about redesigning my blog and reworking the HTML structure as well as the CSS and making it much more minimal.
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I use one of my domains mainly for services that I use personally. My Miniflux instance for example. For a long time I ran Miniflux on a device from home, before I moved it to my virtual private server in the “cloud” a few weeks ago. To also adapt the subdomain I use for it to the scheme of the other subdomains, Miniflux now runs on a different subdomain than before.
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I use Strava as my tracking app on runs. I used to use Runtastic (now Adidas Running), but unfortunately there is no native app for my Samsung Galaxy Watch. But since Strava has now implemented some more restrictions for free users and I’ve been toying with the idea that I need a different system to own my run data (self-hosted) for a while anyway, I’ve now started to program something myself (as always when my desired solution doesn’t exist…).
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I didn’t believe my eyes when I saw this: Windows has an official package manager now. The lack of a package manager was the thing that annoyed me most about Windows. That’s why I always used Chocolatey on Windows, but even that has room for improvement.
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