Jonathan Snook's Blog, page 7

Jungle

Every now and then, an album just really hits the spot. Most of my music recommendations come in through TikTok these days and the latest video from Jungle, Back on 74, has spawned a rabbit hole of videos that I refuse to swipe past. I watch every one.

So enamoured, I downloaded Jungle’s album, Volcano, and then discovered that they have a nearly 50 minute movie that puts the music to an incredibly choreographed dance story. (The movie is $10 but is worth it, in my opinion. But looks like it'll be posted on YouTube in January, if you feel like waiting.)

Upon adding Volcano to the library, I also realized that I had already added a number of Jungle tracks over the months and years. Their music is a fantastic blend of funk and soul and house and electronic. It’s addictive as fuck.

This album and movie will be on repeat for a long time.

Reply via email

A Home For My Photos

Years ago, I wanted to showcase my photography outside of Flickr or Instagram and figured I could integrate it into this very blog. Unfortunately, the backend that I built didn’t make it easy to post new photos. I had to upload the photo to a server somewhere, then go into the content management system and make my edits to point to those images. It was very much shoehorned in and reflected that fact. As a result, after posting maybe half a dozen photos, I never posted another photo again. It was just too much effort.

Reexamining my relationship with social media spurred me to reconsider finding a home for my photos. Thus, I decided to build a photo blog.

Interestingly, I had actually started the design of the site a few years ago and stalled on the execution. It made picking up the mantle that much easier, though. So easy, in fact, that I had the site finished in less than a week after deciding to move forward.

Design Considerations

I took some time to think about what I wanted, structurally, out of the site. Is it like Instagram where it’s just a stream of photos? Is it like Exposure where text is intermingled with a series of photos, all carefully art directed? Or maybe it’s posts with one or more photos?

Constraints are helpful and I didn’t want to go down too many rabbit holes. I decided to take an approach that is closer to Flickr than anything else: primarily single photos with a title and description along with photo details like shutter speed and focal length included.

(I say “primarily” because I left the door open for myself to augment descriptions with additional photos but I won’t worry about that right now.)

Built with 11ty

To anyone who has paid close attention to my development approach over the last few years, it should come as no surprise that I built this using 11ty. I adore its simplicity.

We’ll see if I still have the same appreciation after I have a few hundred photos added. Sometimes the rough edges make themselves known after the friction of an abundance of content.

Mapbox

One feature that I’m particularly happy about is the location-based backgrounds. They’re somewhat subtle, depending on screen brightness and device, but you’ll likely notice either a street map or topographical map behind the photo. These are generated using Mapbox. I created two styles and can specify on a post whether to use the street style or the topographic style. They’re based on the approximate latitude and longitude of the location of the photo.

I use the 11ty Image plugin to access the Mapbox API and cache a local copy of the image so that I’m not hitting Mapbox on every single page request.

Early Days

I’ve just kickstarted the blog and, therefore, there’s only a few photos but I’m looking forward to practicing my photography some more and adding them to the site. I hope you follow along on Photos by Snook. (Yes, there’s an RSS feed all ready to go!)

Reply via email

Not So Fast

“The industry changes so quickly! It’s hard to keep up with everything.”

I’ve been mostly out of touch with the industry over the last couple years, only working on smaller front-end projects, and not really paying much attention to the firehose of web development content being put out there.

What’s interesting is dipping my toes back into the stream and seeing that—despite all the time that has passed—things haven’t really changed that much.

It can be overwhelming feeling the need to stay connected to that firehose but maybe it’s okay to pull back a smidgen. When I look back at how I learn, that initial stage of superficial learning—knowing that something exists—is enough to file in the back of the mind, to go from unknown unknowns to known unknowns—things we are aware of but don’t understand yet.

Blogs have always been good for this. There’s more signal and less noise than a micro blogging platform like Twitter. Maybe a conference or two a year to see what is popular.

It doesn’t take much more than that. And with the scattering of social media platforms, it feels okay to step back and not go so fast.

Reply via email

Vibing

I got into a bit of a rut where everything I listened to seemed to be garage rock from the early 2010s. (Or post-punk revival, or however you want to classify music.) The Black Keys, The White Stripes, Arctic Monkeys, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Franz Ferdinand. I didn’t listen to the radio anymore so I had little to no exposure to new music. Maybe a coffee shop or restaurant would be playing a track and I’d Shazam it to add it to the playlist.

In the past few months, however, I’ve been spending more time on TikTok and subsequently, more time on music recommendation TikTok. As such, my library has been growing more quickly. Here are a few songs/albums that I’ve been enjoying lately…

Ethiopique, Vol 4

I don’t recall exactly how I stumbled across it but I went through a phase of wanting more instrumental background music and Éthiopique really hit the spot. Tezeta is probably my favourite track on the album and has me wanting to just sit in a dimly lit jazz club with a drink in hand.

Live Well by Palace

A breakup song that oozes more positivity than most, which is nice. I also added Bitter, from the same album, to the playlist.

Psycho by Pertinence

I definitely stumbled on this one from TikTok and think it’s a fun, catchy track. The Tehya remix has an amusing counterpoint in it.

Blame Brett by The Beaches

Similarly, found this one on TikTok and similarly, it’s a fun track. I, admittedly, identify with the lyrics of getting into a relationship when not ready for it. “Don’t blame me, blame Brett. Blame my ex, blame my ex, blame my ex.”

Worst Case Scenario by Suff Daddy

This track is too short but love the groove this song puts down.

Reply via email

Downtown Man

That’s what I am.

I’ve gone camping. I’ve done resorts. I’ve been on cruise ships. They all range from “this is fine” to “why are we pretending to be in an episode of the Walking Dead?”

I’m definitely a city boy, through and through, though. When I travel, it’s to other cities. It’s staying in the hustle and bustle, with people and museums and restaurants and shows. It’s being within walking distance or a metro ride and a hop, skip, and a jump to everything. Hitting ten thousand steps a day becomes easy peasy lemon squeezy.

When I was married, after we had kids, we chose to move close to my in-laws, who lived on the edge of suburbia. More square footage. More driving. More boxes made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same.

I’d go for walks and the scenery is monotonous. There’s not a lot of visual interest.

When my ex and I first separated, I rented an apartment downtown. Cramming two kids into a small apartment, driving them to and from the suburbs for school. I made it a year before moving back out to the suburbs.

In the height of the pandemic, when everybody was buying places in the burbs or in the country to escape from covid, I bought a place in the heart of downtown. It might’ve seemed like the wrong move but I figured that things would eventually turn around. And for the most part, they have.

Downtown, there’s a vibrancy and excitement.

This felt exemplified with my routine this morning to visit the nearby coffee shop. I’m in there often enough, they know my name, and the coffee is superb. (Sorry, Starbucks and Timmies doesn’t even come close.) A stream of people shuffling in and out with their caffeine fix. As I finish my coffee and step out of the shop to walk back, I notice bagpipes playing from a nearby memorial.

At lunch, I step out to walk to the barber and there’s a regiment marching down the street. There are festivals of buskers, ribs, jazz, and poutine. There are rivers and museums and architecture.

That’s not to say that it is without its downfalls. There are people screaming. There is loud music when I want quiet. There are car horns blaring. (Fuck you, convoy.) And yet, it feels like it all adds texture to the experience.

I will perch myself on my balcony, with a cigar in one hand and a cocktail in the other, and watch the sun slowly set behind the buildings and hills.

Antithetically, perhaps, being downtown calms me.

As my kids transition from teenagers to adults and I’m left with an empty nest, I may not always be in Ottawa but I would surprise myself if I didn’t find myself in a downtown somewhere.

Reply via email

Deploying an 11ty Site to GitHub Pages Using GitHub Actions

The last time I wrote about deploying to GitHub Pages, it was essentially a tutorial on how to use Travis CI for deployment to GitHub Pages.

Travis, unfortunately, discontinued their free plan but GitHub Actions has become available and, for my needs, works just great. So, here’s how I set up my 11ty sites to deploy automatically to GitHub Pages.

Workflows

GitHub uses custom workflows to run tasks. There’s a marketplace on GitHub for various workflows and I used Eleventy Action for my needs.

It essentially does a build of the 11ty project and then uses the GitHub Pages action to deploy the _site folder to the gh-pages branch.

You save the Eleventy Action file to .github/workflows folder in your codebase. When you push new code, this workflow will automatically run. You can see that the action runs from the Actions tab in your repository on GitHub.

Deployment

Now we need to deploy the gh-pages branch to GitHub Pages. The easiest way to do that is under Settings > Pages. Under Build and deployment, set source to Deploy from a branch and specify the gh-pages branch.

When you push updates to your repository, you should now see two workflows run under the Actions tab. The first is the Eleventy Build and the other is pages-build-deployment.

It is my understanding that you could set the source to GitHub Actions instead of gh-pages and then add some additional incantations to the workflow file to do the same thing but I feel like setting it the way I’ve outlined here is the easiest. It feels unintuitive to me in that there are two workflows running but defined in two separate places.

Custom Domain

I have my sites use a custom domain and when you set the custom domain in Settings, it’ll create a CNAME file in the root of the gh-pages branch. The problem is that the next time you do a push, the build will blow the file away and you’ll lose your custom domain name.

There are two ways to solve this problem.

The first is to specify the cname in the workflow file you created in your project earlier.

- name: Deploy
uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
with:
publish_dir: _site
publish_branch: gh-pages
github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
cname: smacss.com

The second way is to add a new file in the root of your main repo that is called CNAME. Inside that file is a single line that has your domain name. (In my example, the file contents just say smacss.com.)

Then, we need to tell Eleventy to pass that file through to the _site folder. In the .eleventy.js file, there’s likely a section already for passing through files. (If there’s not, just create a new one.)

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("CNAME");
};


Finished

The GitHub Actions are still a little fuzzy for me. As such, I feel like I might’ve made this more complicated than it needs to be but for now, this is working.

Reply via email

Mind Games

In late 2020, I remember seeing those green and yellow squares posted across Twitter and Slack channels. Yes, Wordle was taking off. It was a fun, quick game to kick off a day or something to fill a mid-day break. Then there were all the variants like Quordle, and Worldle, and even Canuckle.

Wordle was so popular it got acquired by the The New York Times. It’s still part of my daily routine. The New York Times recently added Connections, which I find a lot of fun. That, too, has been added to the daily rotation. I’ll do the crossword mini from time to time, although the American centricity sometimes throws me off.

The other quick puzzle game I like to play is Sudoku. I have an app on my phone that I am on frequently throughout the day and has become somewhat of an anxiety reduction tool—to the point where sometimes my fingers start to get sore from tapping the screen too much.

During the pandemic, I came across Cracking the Cryptic on YouTube. It’s a channel focused primarily on solving Sudoku and Sudoku variant puzzles. The variant puzzles, like Killers, Thermos, Arrows, and many other rulesets, add an interesting twist to the otherwise mundane game of Sudoku.

It, too, has become a daily routine of opening the channel to see if there are any new puzzles to be solved. They’ve also released apps on Steam, iOS, and Android with a fixed set of puzzles to solve.

I enjoy these particular puzzles because each one is designed by hand. As a result, they feel like pulling threads on a sweater until eventually one thread unravels the entire thing—or as they say on the channel, “now we’re cooking with gas.” It’s very satisfying.

In some ways, I’ve turned into my father. I don’t know him well as my parents divorced when I was three and I went to live with my mom. We stopped communicating altogether when he disagreed with my decision not to go to university. But as a teenager, he would send me letters. In each letter, he would include a puzzle to solve. That man enjoyed his puzzles. In searching for him years later, I discovered that he frequented a Usenet group for math puzzles.

He hasn’t posted in years, either on there or any other publicly available forum that I’ve seen. Even his own brother (my uncle, natch) hasn’t heard from him in over a decade.

Why he chose to disappear is a puzzle I’ll likely never solve.

Reply via email

Eleventy SMACSS

Twelve years ago, I wrote a book and built a website for it. I built it using CakePHP—my framework of preference at the time—and set up a Linode slice to host it.

It served me well at the time but these days, the book is an historical artifact. I didn’t need to keep paying for a server that was barely being used.

I tried to move it over to the server that hosts Snook.ca but different versions of Ubuntu and PHP meant needing to upgrade the version of CakePHP which would likely mean needing to rewrite chunks of the site itself. This was more work than I really wanted to put in for something that no longer needed to be dynamic.

Instead, I ported over all the content to an 11ty build and created a repo on GitHub. This meant that I was able to use GitHub Pages to host the site for free. I shut down the Linode slice and saved myself $30 a month.

While I’m not a stickler for preservation, it feels good to have this relic preserved—even if it’s mostly outdated.

Reply via email

This Too Shall Pass

I’ve heard this phrase many times over the years. Whenever someone is going through a tough time, someone else might say “this too shall pass” as a way to let them know that this is temporary and that better times are ahead.

I had been struggling with my mental health, and in a reactive state for a long time. Through a lot of therapy and a lot of journalling, I find myself in a better place right now. I feel more at ease, more able to relax, and my productivity has been improving.

I was watching an actor roundtable and in it, Tom Hanks makes reference that this too shall pass. “You feel great? You feel like you know all the answers? You feel like everybody finally gets you? This too shall pass.”

It’s important to me to recognize that when I’m at my worst, this too shall pass, and also recognize that when I’m at my best, this too shall pass.

It’s helping me to appreciate where I am right now—to feel more in the moment. Which is something that I realized, through therapy, that I’ve been chasing. Whether it’s coding, or going to a fancy restaurant, or having a cigar, or meditation, or making an espresso, each thing was an exercise in being present.

I don’t know that I’ve figured out why that feeling is important to me and why I chase it but I do like the feeling. I will almost assuredly have difficult times ahead and, like these calm, happy moments, those too shall pass.

Reply via email

Fly Recklessly

“Have a safe flight.”

Taking this bus in the sky, there’s very little I can control to make it safe or unsafe—y’know, besides trying to yank open a door mid-flight. Don’t do that. It’s really up to the pilots in the cockpit to handle that. Nobody says “have a safe bus ride!” People say “drive safe” and that makes sense; you are the one in control when you’re driving.

Over a decade ago, Kitt and I had this conversation. Since then, we have had our own salutation that we say to each other before we embark on a plane:

“Fly recklessly.”

Reply via email