/blog

Over the past couple of days I been diving in to Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I've seen mixed responses about it but, considering myself a digital minimalist of sorts, thought I'd give it a whirl. I'm not yet into the real meat of it yet so it's a bit like preaching to the choir.

Patrick shared a piece from Gizmodo entitled Delete Most of Your Apps which seemed rather timely. It gives a brief overview of a number of the points Newport is making: take back control, create extra headspace, improve privacy, so it will be interesting to see how much more he can add in a book compared to an article.

It's funny how things change. I just removed some plugins from WordPress, mainly ones that I wrote to make it work just how I wanted it but no longer need now that the blog has moved. Others are still present, required for the journal or general display purposes, but the core posting plugins are gone. Once I confirm the muse-letter works after migration I'll be able to remove that plugin as well.

It's a little bittersweet – on the one hand it feels good as I know that I have a new solution but, on the other, it feels a little sad that the fruits of so much time and effort are now redundant.

Still, we move on and I'm much happier with the custom solution.

In reply to: I feel this when I improve implementations all the time - ⛰️Tanzawa...

"When writing code I try to remind myself that all is temporary and will be deleted or rewritten at some point, so I best not grow too fond of it."

Ha! Very true. Thanks for the reminder.

One thing missing since the move from WordPress was the ability to link to specific comments – mainly as the comment sections are collapsed by default. Following on from auto expanding posts when linked directly, I've settled on a way of both expanding the relevant post and highlighting the linked comment by including a parameter in the URL then working a bit of javascript magic.

A comment link is in the format /blog.php?c=2:1 where 2:1 means post 2, first comment – this for example. The target comment is scrolled into view and highlighted within a contrasting box in the same manner as fragmentions.

I think it works quite well.

James' reply showed that I needed to crop a returned page title when doing a like or reply if it is of an excessive length.

I found this little code snippet – fittingly on a page with a particularly long title – and will now truncate a title at the word closest to 50 characters.

Keeps things a little tidier.