Are Mac developers actually adopting the menu item icons in macOS 26? I’m torn… I think this design change was unnecessary and adds clutter. But also, it feels incomplete if I don’t add my own icons.
John Berger could have written a book called ‘Ways of Listening’. He listened with his whole body. As though my words were rain, and he was the earth. He absorbed everything, gathered every drop, missed absolutely nothing. His listening eyes were lakes in the high mountains. It was love, there’s no other word for it. I don’t think that stillness, that quality of attention, is even possible in digital-age humans, who suckle on mobile phones from the moment they’re born. It’s a generational thing. Lost forever, I believe.
Book Review NY Times: “She Raged. She Terrified. And She Shape Arundhati Roy. The prizewinning novelist’s unsparing memoir, “Mother Mary Comes to Me,” captures the eventful life and times of her mother, a driven educator and imperfect inspiration.”
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
I’m coming up on 20 years of professional web development and I still don’t get it sometimes. I tend to measure myself or view work productivity through the lens of “How much code did I write?” and that does a great disservice to myself and what I do.
There’s a lot more to the job:
Checking email
Scheduling calls
Writing release notes
Contributing to newsletters
Documentation (code and otherwise)
Making spreadsheets
Demystifying the work I do to teammates
Clarifying decisions
Having technical conversations with teammates
Having non-technical conversations with teammates
Investigating weird browser behaviors
Babysitting servers and build processes
Reviewing PRs
Manual QA on branch deploys
Attending meetings
Attending talks (internal/external)
Cross-org contributions
Learning
Planning
Dreaming
Scheming
Community Ops
Moving cards across a board
Reading thru backlogs
Associating tickets to PRs
Closing out old tickets
Reading specs
Giving feedback on web standards
Eating lunch
Taking walks
Cleaning my home office
These are all aspects of becoming a better web developer. It’s not always about lines-of-code or hours-in-chair. Ideally, we’re all shipping our creations, but sometimes you’re the lead role and sometimes you’re a supporting role. A lot of the work is immeasurable, but it all counts towards something. So… self, don’t be so hard on yourself.
When our doggo carries around her chew toy like this, I always think she looks a little like Winston Churchill with his cigar. If Churchill also wasn’t able to stop blepping, that is!
Happy Eleventh of Bleptember! (This one’s not going out on Mastodon, at least not immediately, because I’m having some Internet difficulties at home right now!)
📰 Using a feed reader is the best way to read my blog posts. How clever you are to know that! 🚀
As an example, I recently wanted to subscribe to the RawTools newsletter. When I went to their newsletter subscription page, I noticed that their URL looked like this: https://rawtools.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3&id=4ff553ba3e
If you can find a URL from a Mailchimp email campaign in a format like this, you can usually use it to get its respective RSS feed.
There are 3 pieces we need in order to find this list’s RSS feed, and all of them we can find in this URL: us11 - This appears to be the Mailchimp server location associated with the mailing list’s account u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3 - I think this is a user identification code? Not sure. We need it, though!
id=4ff553ba3e - Again, not 100% sure what this is; possibly a list id? We need it too, regardless ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Once we’ve got those pieces, we can use them to construct our RSS feed.
A Mailchimp list’s RSS feed looks like this: https://[SERVER LOCATION CODE].campaign-archive.com/feed?u=["u" CODE]&id=["id" CODE]
The campaign-archive and /feed parts are the important parts that need to be switched out here.
So, we put all those pieces together, and end up with the following feed URL:
https://us11.campaign-archive.com/feed?u=00722345fc94fb4d4b323edc3&id=4ff553ba3e
Then, adding that into an RSS reader app gives us the last few campaign emails that were sent out from that list, as well as allows us to be notified of future emails without it cluttering up our email inbox.
I thought I’d found one of these before but there are none currently sitting in my blogroll. Hope it’s useful to someone!
Reminder: Sept 18, one week from today, is the 3rd anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the release of RSS 2.0. I often forget to mark that day. It's not an event that's marked by others very often, but in my humble opinion, it deserves more respect than it gets. #
Around the time of the 20th anniversary I decided to swing back and see what more we could do with RSS. It had been sitting there basically going nowhere for most of those 20 years. I want to be clear, there were good and useful products created and supported, but there was none of the innovation that would have happened if it hadn't been so severely injured by Google and the many VC-backed startups hacking away at it.#
A format like RSS has to be loved. And if you make it too complicated or vague, with too much political shuffling of the deck what you get is ActivityPub. That's what RSS would have become if it went down the path the tech industry wanted to take it down. We have a perfect artifact to look at. An A-B comparison. Couldn't be more stark. And, after almost 23 years, RSS is still simple.#
Anyway, around the 20th anniversary, in the leadup to it, I decided if no one else was going to invest in RSS, I would, and let's see what comes of it.#
The result was FeedLand which is fundamentally different from all the other feed readers in that its subscription model is patterned after the twitter-like social media apps. Everyone's subscription list is public. I can look at your list and you can look at mine. You can also put categories on the feeds you subscribe to and route them to other servers doing other things, through the magic of the web. And get this -- you can even subscribe to a category of my subscriptions. Lots of power there, but still it's simple.#
FeedLand is the perfect back-end for a twitter-like system, for the feeds part. And for the words, the perfect back-end is WordPress. I only discovered that about 1.5 years ago. And I had to see what it looks like. No more tiny little text boxes, WordLand is a real editor that supports the basic writing features of the web. How do I know? Because it saves its data in Markdown. That has come to be the defining format for the text-based web. One which has been totally ignored by the twitter-like systems. Markdown is like MP3. If you're mixing sound into feeds you use MP3 of course. It's there for you to use. As was Markdown. If you're mixing text you're mixing Markdown. #
So while everyone was dancing on Twitter's dumpster fire of a social network I decided to build on something much bigger. The web. RSS and Markdown. WordPress and FeedLand. #
The name Really Simple Syndication is supposed to make you smile, while most techie formats make you want to pull your hair out. RSS reads pretty well even if you know nothing about feeds and XML. I wish the browser people hadn't insisted on masking it with ugly CSS style sheets. I like lifting the hood of a car to see what's there even though I don't know what many of the things in there do. I learn by doing it. #
RSS isn't ugly, it's brilliant, and shouldn't be fear-inducing, hence the promise: it's really simple.#
Finally investigating why SMS stopped working. Now that we have Passkeys in Micro.blog, I think I’m going to scrap SMS as an option, and clear all the phone number data we have for users. It clearly wasn’t used much anyway.
#