14/07/2017

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

# As TextWrangler is being sunsetted some may wonder why I haven't moved to BBEdit.

I like that TW is a very light app that I can just use for moving chunks of text or code around. That's really all I use it for, but it's still more than just a notepad-type app so won't screw up what I copy by not understanding indentation etc.

Maybe I'll look at BBEdit in future as it looks like it scales back once the evaluation period has expired so could also be light enough for how I would use it.

# My wife asked if I was used to the Mac yet and whether it was better than a Windows laptop.

It's a mixed bag.

One thing I'm trying not to do is to view things through shiny-new-toy, rose tinted spectacles.

It feels more natural working with the trackpad and keyboard shortcuts on a Mac, maybe it's just because I am coming to it fresh and deliberately trying to learn my way around as opposed to being a Windows mouse junkie stuck with old habits.

As I said before, there is no contest on the hardware front, at least not with any of the Windows laptops I've ever used. Software, however, is a far more even proposition.

Using OSX can be more intuitive at times but it is visually inconsistent. It may have been through various aesthetic revisions but it can feel old. I think Microsoft has done a better job of enforcing a standard look for applications on the desktop and the Windows design language is now generally more modern.

I find this quite surprising coming from the company that gave us iOS with its strict UI guidelines and conventions, and would expect more of this approach to have transferred to the desktop OS.

2 comments: click to read or leave your own Comments

# In reply to: 14/07/2017, 15:06...

The MacBook's performance cannot be faulted. It absolutely flies!

(This post is also a test. I'll explain later.)

Explaining the test

Reworking the blog for the #indieweb meant adding microformats2 classes to specific template areas in order to correctly identify the required content.

Nowhere is this felt more keenly than in the social element that ties much of the indieweb together: webmentions.

To be correctly interpreted a webmention needs a number of attributes:

  • target URL: the location it is referencing,
  • source URL: where it is coming from,
  • the type of webmention: like, reply, RSVP, etc.
  • the author: who is sending it, and
  • the content: what the webmention is saying

Ive covered various parts of this before so won't retread that ground but I noticed one thing I had wrong: the content.

By wrong I mean that it included extra information that didn't need to be part of the webmention. The post meta.

WordPress, or more specifically the theme used, structures posts in certain ways so that it repeatedly, reliably includes the same information when running through the post loop.

Essentially my posts were formatted as article > entry > entry content & post meta. As well as inserting a h-card for author, I had marked up entry as h-entry and the entry content as e-content but then realised that the post meta was held within the entry content div.

This meant the permalink code was included in the content sent to the target URL and not always getting display correctly.

Moving the post meta outside of the entry content solved the problem but meant I had to rework the CSS to keep it all looking like it should.

# Liked: Adventures in microblogging part 3...

"it is nice to see others exploring and thinking this out loud"

It's fascinating to see how other people take the same basic tools and concepts but fashion them into workflows to meet their individual needs.

The web isn't one size fits all but it's nice to know we can have shared experiences, albeit on our own terms, using variations on a theme.

# Another little usability tweak on the Today page: the down arrow in the top right looked like you should be able to do something with it so it now links to the last post on the page.