Jeremy Keith's Blog, page 103

100 words 052

There was a Clearleft outing to Bletchley Park today. I can’t believe I hadn’t been before. It was nerdvana���crypto, history, and science combined in one very English location.

Alan Turing’s work at Station X is rightly lauded, but I can’t help feeling a bit uncomfortable with the way we make heroes of those who work in the shadows. After the war, England’s fictional hero was James Bond, the creation of former Bletchley worker Ian Fleming. And now we have GCHQ spying on its own citizens.

Righteousness in the past doesn’t earn a country a free pass for the future.

Small independent pieces, loosely joined

It was fascinating at Indie Web Camp Germany to see how much could be accomplished by taking some pre-existing small things and loosely joining them.

For example, there are already webmention and micropub plug-ins for quite a few CMSs. If you’re using Wordpress or Jekyll, you can get pretty far pretty quickly by making use of what people have already provided. And after that Indie Web Camp, you can add Drupal and Kirby to the list of CMSs with readily-available components.

I was somewhat surprised���and very pleased���that people made use of some little PHP snippets that I had posted as gists. I deliberately posted them as gists to show how minimal and barebones the code could be���no need for a whole project, or installers, or dockering the node to yeoman the gulp, or whatever it is the cool kids do these days.

This modular approach also worked well for interface elements. Glenn and Aaron worked on separate projects to create small JavaScript enhancements for posting interfaces. Assemble enough of these enhancements together and before you know it, you’ve got something approaching Medium.

By the end of the second day, I was amazed to see how much progress people had made. Like Johannes says:

I was pretty impressed by how much people got done. At the final demo session, everyone had something he or she had done to update their website ��� although I���m pretty sure that the end of this event will not be the end of their efforts to try and own their stuff online.

It was quite inspiring. In fact, I think I’ve been inspired to have an Indie Web Camp in Brighton. I’m thinking we could have it at the same time as Indie Web Camp Portland, which is on July 11th and 12th.

Save the dates.

100 words 051

I’ve been thinking about what Harry said recently about logic in CSS. I think he makes an astute observation.

You can think of each part of a selector as a condition:

condition { }

That translates to code like:

if (condition) { }

So if you have a CSS selector like this:

condition1 condition2 condition3 { }

…it translates to code like this:

if (condition1) {
if (condition2) {
if (condition3) {
}
}
}

That doesn’t feel very elegant, even in its simpler form:

if (condition1 && condition2 && condition3) { }

I like Harry’s rule of thumb:

Think of your selectors as mini programs: Every time you nest or qualify, you are adding an if statement; read these ifs out loud to yourself to try and keep your selectors sane.

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I spoke at the Beyond Tellerrand conference today. I wasn’t expecting to speak at the Beyond Tellerrand conference today.

Marc asked me just a few days ago if I might be able to step into the breach. I was going to be attending the conference today anyway���my flight back to Brighton was in the evening���so I said sure, why not?

It was fun. Except for the moment when my throat decided it didn’t want to cooperate with this whole public speaking thing and just closed up for a minute or so. That was just a little bit disconcerting.

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The second day of Indie Web Camp Germany was really productive. It was amazing to see how much could be accomplished in just one day of collaborative hacking���people were posting to Twitter from their own site, sending webmentions, and creating their own micropub endpoints.

I made a little improvement to the links section of my site. Now every time I link to something, I check to see if it accepts webmentions and if it does, I ping it to let you know that I’ve linked to it.

I’ve posted the code as a gist. Feel free to use it.

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Today was the first day of Indie Web Camp Germany here in Düsseldorf. The environment couldn’t have been better—the swank sipgate building has plenty of room, fantastic food, and ridiculously friendly people on hand to make sure that everything goes smoothly.

Day one is the discussion day. The topics fortuitously formed a great narrative starting with the simple building blocks of microformats, leading into webmentions, then authentication, and finally micropub and posting interfaces.

My brain is full after talking through these technologies in increasing order of complexity. Enough talking. Now I’m ready to start coding. Bring on day two.

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One of the great pleasures of travelling is partaking of the local cuisine. Today I travelled to Düsseldorf. As soon as I arrived, I went out for ramen.

Wait, what?

You might be thinking that I should really be making the most of the pork and potato dishes that Germany is famed for, but the fact is that the ramen here is really good.

Düsseldorf, you see, has one of the largest Japanese populations of anywhere in Germany. It all started in the ’50s when a number of Japanese companies set up shop here.

The result: great ramen in Düsseldorf.

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I grew up in Cobh—pronounced “cove”—Cork, Ireland. There’s a statue in the middle of town; an angel presiding over the figures of local fishermen who lost their lives 100 years ago when a German U-boat torpedoed and sank The Lusitania off the old head of Kinsale. They were attempting to rescue survivors.

On the outskirts of town there’s an old cemetery where a mass grave was dug for the bodies of the Lusitania victims.

Cobh’s history is filled with ill-fated ships. It was the last stop of The Titanic. The ships are now memorialised as pub names.

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For forty four days I wrote and published 100 words every day. I was cutting it close sometimes, getting a post in just before midnight, but I always managed it.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday was a very busy day. I worked hard and I played hard (that’s an explanation, not an excuse).

I’ve been working with a lovely team of designers and developers from John Lewis. They came down to Brighton yesterday and it was very productive.

Then we went for a curry, then karaoke, then a few more drinks. It was past midnight when I got home. No 100 words.

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It was Clearleft’s turn to host Codebar again this evening. As always, it was great. I did my best to introduce some people to HTML and CSS, which was challenging, rewarding, and fun.

In the run-up to the event, I did a little spring cleaning of Clearleft’s bookshelves. I took some books on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that weren’t being used any more and offered them to Codebar students for the taking.

I was also able to offer some more contemporary books thanks to the generosity of A Book Apart who kindly donated some of their fine volumes to Codebar.