Mandaris

I’ve been thinking about the general friction that I experience when it comes to making posts and then putting them onto my blog. It feels that it has become both easier and harder to write something that I like.

What do I mean by writing?

In this instance, I am referring to my posts that are more than my pithy one liners or pictures of my dog.

It’s valid and I am not ashamed of most any of it.

What I’m referring to in this article is anything that takes longer than 10 minutes to write. These pieces of writing are harder for me because of the amount of time and focus that I am able to put into it.

I feel that I only have a couple of minutes before my mind wonders or I am called upon to do something else. Most times it’s my own brain telling me about all the other things I should/could be doing.

Where do my ideas start?

I used to carry a set of index cards; at one point called the hipster PDA. I stopped after losing my Good quality pens on a regular basis and being mocked repeatedly by my loving wife.

Since then, I’ve tried adding information to Apple Reminders or Notes (this was before they got good). It’s decent for simple one liners but complex ideas would come with the unwritten hope that I would remember what I meant by “pumpkin pickles”.

Recently, I’ve started using Drafts to capture links and notes. At first, I thought that I was only going to be using it for a little bit. Some of the podcasters have been raving about it for years and I got caught up in hype around it.

The hype is real. I’ve grown to like it more and more because of the simplicity and stability of the software. The sync has been pretty good; I’m able to start writing in one place and then move from one device to another. I’ve even had a few ideas start off from a voice dictation on my watch, but I’ve only done that less than a dozen times.

I’ve played around with the idea of keeping a rule to clear out the inbox daily. I haven’t stuck to it, but this is mainly because I see the Drafts inbox as something that I have complete control over. Unlike my email inbox which has seen a tremendous increase in things wanting my attention.

Revisions?

Drafts is a wonderful application and I’ll continue exploring it as I’ve become more comfortable with its feature set. One of the hurdles that I’m running into is that I’m looking for a way to do grammar checks.

A lot¹ of my writing is done in chunks that are determined by availability of time and energy.

I feel that I need a workflow to help me decide if something that I wrote makes sense before posting it on the World Wide Web.

I’ve tried putting my draft into Ulysses. Unfortunately, a large portion of my writing contains code examples that have the formatting removed when sent to the server.

The hardest posts for me to write are the ones about my Hugo/Micro.blog theme. For those posts, I find myself moving from Ulysses to BBEdit/iTerm to Marsedit.

It makes me not want to put in the time to write.

But, I really enjoy writing.

So, I’ll be pushing myself to read over my drafts … in drafts going forward.

In high school, I had to read a book titled “Go Ask Alice”. It was a book composed of journal entries of a young woman who get addicted to drugs and experiences a lot of misfortune before ultimately dying from an overdose.

One of the interesting things about it was during the class discussion, we talked about how the book wasn’t actually real and that the accounts in the book might be a composition of different stories put together. An allegory of what could happens if you do drugs.

I used to think that something like that would do the opposite of keeping kids off drugs. Once you know that “Alice” wasn’t real, then what else isn’t real in the story.

It was disingenuous.

A similar book recently came out about “A million little pieces” and it was worse as the author at first claimed it was his own story and was even in the Oprah Winfrey’s book club.

But, now I think I can look upon these works from a different view point.

These stories don’t have to be 100% accurate.

It’s because we see them time and time again. Different names, different faces.

Same out come.

My daughter was telling me about a classmate at her school who was bragging about how she was high during school.

Does it matter if her name is “Alice”?

I just pushed a point release of the theme to GitHub. The majority of the changes are related to colors and line adjustments based off of reading 12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades by Stephanie Eckles.

Crossing the line

Years ago, I read an article stating that although it’s good to underline links, it can be difficult in some circumstance because certain characters like q, j, p will touch the line. Some developers used box-shadow get around this and I had taken that route for this theme.

When I read Stephanie’s article, I came across a section I learned about text-underline-offset. I also checked that I can use it in most browsers before I let myself get excited. I spent the last couple of days refactoring my CSS to use this finally posted it.

There are still instances where the text intersects the line, but during writing this post, I came across this article on styling with underlines by Ollie Williams. In it, he mentions that the property text-decoration-skip-ink is on by default.

…

Well, I’m hoping that this understanding of how these things work lead to a better site in the future. Although, I still use box-shadow as a makeshift highlight for hovering over links, removing it from link underlining reduces complexity.

The space between us

Other than that, I’m doing some adjustments to line-height. Elements such as ruby, rt, sub, and sup can cause the linespacing not to be uniform within a paragraph. I adjusted the spacing by doing this in the root element but I do not like the way that it added space between all the other block elements on the page.

I pushed this change but it’s probably moving to the top of the list of priorities after I do some more research on the rhythm of line spacing.

Another coat of paint

I’ve decided to change the color for the headings so that it is closer to the basic font. This will increase the contrast ratio and make it easier to read.

For this, I learned to let go of trying to make everything pop out at you and let my readers enjoy reading the site.

The ReadMe

When I do a point release, I update the README.md on the GitHub project page.

Here are the release notes for this point release.

• Improve h* tags by changing color to --text-alt
• Make changes to text-decoration inspired by 12 Modern CSS One-Line Upgrades to various elements
• Turn on debugging by default temporarily
• Modify cursor on <abbr>
• Adjust line-height to make sub, sup, and ruby elements less obtrusive
• Add accent-color to root of CSS

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions or comments!