Links for 8/14/2020

• Gorgeous poster of handrawn mineral illustrations. I bought one immediately. (via Kottke.org)
• I Was a Useful Idiot for Capitalism, by Kurt Anderson for The Atlantic. An insightful essay by someone who experienced the decades before me.
• This is the Amazon support page which actually leads to receiving help.
• 150 years of articles in the Atlantic on race and racism.
• Super Mario™ on the Nintendo Entertainment System™ with TV in LEGO®.
• The episode, A Serious Conversation About UFOS, of the Ezra Klein podcast was fascinating; an interview with Diana Walsh Pasulka. I bought and read her book, American Cosmic, right after and loved it, too.
• The Chihuo is a website dedicated to Chinese cuisine and restaurants in the USA and Canada. I look forward to the day when I can make use of this resource.

The Republic of Newsletters

I really like Robin's idea of a hardware device for reading open-web blogs:

I still believe in a Kindle/Analogue-esque device that, within it, contains an operating system that is half Patreon, half Substack, half Instapaper.

I think of this as the Republic of Newsletters writ large—The OmniBlog—where writers can publish their work and folks can subscribe via RSS but with a Coil-esque payment system built in and preloaded onto a physical e-reader. Writers could blog away, connected to eachother, whilst readers could subscribe to their work and perhaps even fund larger pieces of writing[.]

It's a fun idea to think about. A paperwhite-like screen would be amazing, but so many blogs also post images and videos. And the device would need a decent browser to allow following links. These are issues which make a separate hardware device less likely to happen. I mean, iPads. But it's interesting.

He ends by fearing he's "just described Medium," but I don't think so. The problem with Medium is that they possess your content. What the internet needs is a next-level application for finding, subscribing to, and reading blogs in one place, via RSS. Something a few notches better than what today's newsreaders provide.

Good Sudoku is Great

I recently became a Sudoku player. It's because of Good Sudoku, a newly released iOS app by Zach Gate and Jack Schlesinger. I wasn't looking to get into a puzzle game which is seemingly most popular among retirees, but it happened.

Good Sudoku is beautifully designed and a joy to play. The best feature is the Improve section, which includes a few educational subsections, "How to play," "Note taking," and "Techniques." So not only is the gameplay fun, but I can learn more tips and tricks to improve. The first dozen Expert puzzles took me around an hour to finish, but now I'm completing them in around 15min. I suppose the way Sudoku releases endorphines and dopamines is why it's so hugely popular. I get it now.

Two design complaints, though. One is that the "Hint" button is too close to the note options. It's too easy to accidentally tap that help button which immediately shows you a next move, a deflating feeling. And it instantly deducts a ton of points from your score (if you care about that). The other complaint is the UX around the note buttons. After hours of play, I'm still never confident when they're on or off, as they automatically disable after some actions but not after others. It often leads me to selecting a number when I didn't intend to. Sometimes I notice, and sometimes I don't. As a fix, I would drastically change the look of the number pad when any notation method is selected.

Small issues. No big deal. Five stars to Good Sudoku.

Update 8/15/2020: In the latest app update, both of these issues I had have been fixed. Gone. So, six stars out of five, now, I guess.

Cushion Interview, 2014

Back in 2014, I was interviewed for one of the Cushion app blogs. Had a great conversation with Carly Ayres, and the resulting post was pretty good! Huge thanks to Carly for the call, and to Jonnie for the invitation.

If you're a freelancer, either full or part time, you really should be using Cushion to track your income and to visualize your work load. Even now, with only a single freelance client, I still pay the monthly fee to track it. Absolutely worth it.

And thanks to Ping Zhu for the fantastic illo.

BrianFeeney.us v10

Whoops. Designed and rebuilt my site, again. Version 9 has been up for about a week and I've already updated it. Why?

The design of v10 was one of the many in the running for v9, but because it involved more complexity and refinement, I put it off. My first order of business had been getting the new Craft 3 CMS installed and online. To do that quickly, I had chosen a simpler design.

The design of v9 was fine, but it wasn't enough. It lacked character. With this iteration, I've tried to make something that walks further down the road of a single concept. The idea was to take elements from technical manuals and printing samples and apply them to a web page. Probably not the first to do this, but it feels fresh to me.

I still feel like the best way to read my site is actually not via the site itself, but with RSS. And so I've allowed a couple things to obstruct the experience a bit. The dotted lines marking "the fold" and the 50% scroll depth will occasionally overlap with text. The randomized duotone color on the writing and quotes pages sometimes have non-ideal contrast for great reading. I like something about this. A little bit of contained chaos.

I've still prioritized the photoblog over all other content. Perhaps someday soon, I'll change the index to better balance the types of stuff I have on the site. I want to make an about page, but am considering making that the homepage, instead. Not sure, yet.

I'm really proud of this one. One of my favorite bits is the metadata I'm sharing about the page: browser window hight, page height, page load speed, character count. I'm looking to find a couple more measurable things that I can add. Page size, is one, but I'm not yet sure I can accurately pull that using jquery.

There is one new thing in v10: photo collections. I've made a few groupings of photos I've posted along a theme, place, or time. There are over 700 photos in the entire gallery. Not every one will belong to a collection, and some might end up in a few. I want to start considering the work I've done to date and to see what makes a photo I've taken a Brian Feeney photograph. Making these collections would help.

I still plan to rebuild this site with vue.js. I'd love to make page transitions smoother, and to animate some sections in creative ways. This will probably be a winter project, once we're all trapped indoors again.

An iOS App for Album Collections

My Apple Music library contains 47,400 tracks. It's an unwieldy mess. Is that maybe too much music? No, and don't ask that again. I need all of it. For reasons.

Neither the OSX nor iOS apps allow for any real album organization. Playlists are the best option, but that's a design solution for songs not albums. What I want is a way to scroll through a collection of albums that I've set aside. Similar to having a massive record collection in one room, but being able to leave a couple dozen next to the record player for quick access. Some favorite records. Newly acquired records. Records I want to remember to listen to again, soon.

I can excuse Apple for leaving this out. How many people really have more than a few thousand songs in their library? Can't be that many. For nearly everyone, the regular library is perfectly scrollable. For me, it's completely useless.

Apple could add another tab to their Music app for this feature, but that would require yet one more slightly confusing UI pattern for yet another kind of grouping. The best answer is to have a separate app entirely. Just as I'd like to pull my Albums Of The Day off the shelf to leave near the record player, I'd like a second app for quickly getting to the records I want to listen to at the moment.

I've designed this app. It's very simple, and I was able to use only Apple-provided UI. This could be built without any custom components at all, as far as I can tell. The simplicity of the app has tempted me to build it myself a couple times, but I'm still stymied by Xcode and my limited programming skills. Maybe third times a charm?

I share the designs here, and would be happy to see anyone — literally anyone — build it themselves. I wouldn't even ask for any of the profits. If you made this app, I'd even pay for it. Charge me $19.99. Having this would be such a benefit to my listening habits.

Tuning Myself to Luck

There's a great anecdote in American Cosmic about a scientist who "tunes" his body to receive signals from the universe and readies himself to act on it, even if they were mistakes. I do something similar, though it has nothing to do with communicating with aliens.

I like to be sure there is a certain amount of chaos in my life. Enough to randomly generate new things for me to experience, but not so much that I can't make use of new info or take advantage of opportunities. If there's too much chaos, it becomes difficult to single out the right element to act on. The sweet spot is when you can watch the chaos unfold, and can see the opportunity present itself before it does.

It's a mystic way of looking at luck.

I'm realizing it's been months since I've successfully made good on this kind of opportunity. Not since the pandemic shutdown. Too much chaos.

From the Mind's Eye

Om Malik shares this great Ansel Adams quote:

In another interview, Adams pointed out that most people think of photography as an external event. You see a scene and snap, snap, snap. It is “recording things for their own memory in the future,” Adams said. In contrast, when it comes to creative photography, Adams pointed out that there is an internal event inside your mind.

Adams pointed to a comment by Alfred Stieglitz, another legendary photographer. “I never really go out to make a photograph,” Stieglitz said. “When I come across something that excites me, and I see the picture in my mind’s eye, and I make the photograph.”

“Specifically seeing it the mind’s eye which we call visualization,” Adams said in the interview. “The picture has to be there clearly, and if you have enough craft in your own work, in your practice, then you can then make the photograph.”

Productivity in 2020

Life has changed drastically since March. Permanently working from home breaks the clean split between home space and work space, between personal time and productivity. I've never been great at establishing boundaries between the two, but now it's worse. For my own sanity, I need to find a solution.

I'm trying a new scheduling method. 10am to 6pm, I produce. I do my work. I write. I edit photos. I post to my site. I think deeper about the issues I face as a designer. I do not read anything online. Not blogs, nor Twitter. I want to bifurcate my day. Two halves, one for making and one for consuming.

If I happen to find myself with ten free minutes between meetings, I'm going to take a pause and sit in the space. No blogs, no Twitter, nor news reading. Ten minutes is not enough to time for good design work, but there are other things to do instead of catching up on news. Even just sitting quietly and doing nothing is better than filling my brain with non-design information. Boredom is ok. Boredom allows the mind to relax and to stretch.

It's stupid to even think that ten minutes of downtime is boredom.

I also need to push back against the desire to multi-task. Now that I'm no longer in conference rooms with my colleagues, I'm extremely prone to emailing/Slacking/designing when I should be listening. This leads to a low-level anxiety that builds up by the end of the day, exhausting me.

The dumb solution I have for this problem is to fiddle with my Fidget Cube. It really helps me concentrate when my hands have something to click, spin, or rotate. My attention is easily stolen, I can admit. If I can ward off a wandering mind with a little, clicky, cube of plastic, that's great.

This is all about intentionality. Mental health over productivity. Be in control over how I spend my day. It isn't good for me to allow my whims to dictate what I do. If I can be successful at these two plans, I believe I would be much happier.

Site Design v9

Here's a new site redesign. Did this one pretty quick, just to install a new instance of Craft, updated from version 2 to version 3. I had tried to do this a couple years ago, but I kept failing to get Craft 3 to work locally. While I'm a competent front-end developer, I struggle with a lot of the CLI installations and understanding what dependencies are required and how they work. I'm missing some basic, modern development lessons in my self-education. I take pride in that my website is designed, developed, and installed by myself. The installation part is a massive headache, though. Literally, this time. I've had a migraine the last three days.

This design is intended to put the photo blog front and center. It's the center piece to my entire website, and will likely always be. Part of me wants my site to be only a photo blog, but I still want my writing and portfolio to be somewhere discoverable. So the photos are right there at the top, everything else below. I have some ideas on how to better present the writing, and I want to add some kind of section on the index page promoting my portfolio of work. I need to design and put up an about page.

This version of my site is the first which includes a lot of flex-box and grid css. I hadn't yet really played with these no-longer-very-new additions to styling. Especially when it comes to page layout. I've used a jquery script called Color Thief to grab dominant colors from my photos to add varying palettes to pages and sections. (They're mostly accessible in contrast, but not 100%. I plan to work on that, soon.) Next is even more accessibility work. I'm proud to prioritize a11y practices in my day job as a designer. It's time I learn how to put them into practice as a developer.

While it only took me a couple weeks to design and develop this site locally, it took me equally long to get it working on my public server. Every time I do this, I get hung up on web roots, domains, and .htaccess files. Every. Damn. Time. There doesn't seem to be single good resource online to explain it. Maybe because it's supposedly simple? Basic? Self-explanatory? Well, it isn't. Something about the entire process is completely impossible for me to understand.

If you're installing a Craft 3 instance and having trouble, here are a few things which I needed to do to get it working. First, the default folder structure for Craft worked locally for me, but it had to be rearranged on my host server according to this article in order to load. I cannot explain why. The next issue was that while I could confirm my database was set to use php 7.3.11, it took me hours to discover that my server was actually set to a php 5.something. I didn't know that was possible. After that, the site loaded. Woo! The public facing part of the site was finally working, fully navigable. But I couldn't log into the admin page. By all appearences the issue was my credentials, that the admin/password was wrong, or that maybe it wasn't connecting to the database? But the database was recording my failed login attempts, so it wasn't a db connection issue. Turns out I needed this line of code

requireUserAgentAndIpForSession' => false,

added to the general.php file. But I lost a day because I had placed the line in the wrong place; it goes in the Environment section of the code, not the General Settings. Oops, again. I'm so bad at this.

But that was it! The site is up, and it's working, and I'm able to post. A huge thank you to Brad and Oli at Craft for their assistance. They were extremely patient with me and my idiocy with these sysadmin issues. I really should just hire someone to do this part of the job for me, but I'm stubborn. I demand to do it myself, like a jerk.

There's another redesign coming. Could you guess? One of the reasons I'm excited to have my site on Craft 3, now, is that it can work as a headless CMS with an API. This means I can build my next site with Vue.js, which I've wanted to do for a long while. The kind of UX and navigation I've long imagined for my site is only possible if I can applify it, which now I can do. I have a fair amount of lite experience with the Ember and React frameworks, but getting something like that up and running myself will be a challenge. I'm excited to learn something new and stretch my skills a bit. My hope is that it doesn't take more than six months to get brianfeeney.us v10 online. So let's see if I can do it.

Update (8/11/2020): I launched v10.