/blog

The weather yesterday was appalling, high winds all day. I had to rescue the water dish from the bird feeder from across the garden but due to the winds didn't put any food down – there was no point.

When I got out in the garden about 8:30 this morning one of the robins must have heard me and sat on the fence, watching as I restocked the feeder and placed some feed and mealworms in the usual place on the ground. I stepped back a few paces towards the house to see what would happen and it did swoop down to grab a few mealworms before perching on the fence again. It doesn't entirely trust me but it is getting better.

After considering starting a new character in World of Warcraft – because I wasn't enjoying it and hadn't played – I've spent the last week trying to get to grips with a Marksmanship Hunter (for those who know anything about WoW) and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it despite getting it up to max-level ready for "end-game catch up."

I was asked if I'd missed playing and I could honestly answer "not really" – so why go back?

WoW is not a solitary pastime in our house, playing is not someone being tucked away in a corner, but a family activity, something to bond over and have fun with together. That's a good reason to start playing again. I can't really say that I've enjoyed levelling up (but then levelling always sucks) so hope that getting caught up and doing multi-player content again will improve things. The only issue is that the reason I stopped playing was the multi-layer grind which I've now got to go through to get to that point.

If there's one thing I'm not entirely happy with about the blog it's using Google Fonts – and, I suppose by extension, Font Awesome. Relying on external providers is never an ideal solution but, in the case of Google Fonts, it was the easy option as a direct carry-over from the WordPress blog as I wanted to keep the look and feel largely the same.

The alternatives are:

1. self-hosting custom fonts, and
2. using standard, web safe fonts

Self-hosting custom web fonts removes the third-party element from the equation but introduces extra downloads. The one advantage of Google Fonts (especially the two I'm using) is that they are popular and used by a lot of sites; the chances are a visitor to your site will already have the fonts cached so there is not performance hit.

Using web safe fonts drastically reduces your options. In my case going this route would mean that I could no longer have a condensed font for titles and certain navigation elements. It's quite a small thing and shouldn't worry me but it does. I've had the same basic look since "the great reboot of 2016" and changing things doesn't feel right at the moment. Maybe I just need to get over myself on that front.

I tried downloading the version of Open Sans Condensed from Font Squirrel and it isn't the same as the Google Fonts version so I'm looking to create my own web font package from the Google version. If I follow this line of logic then I'll also need to replace any Font Awesome items with images.

The things we go put ourselves through!