Today, through that web browser, there are movies and TV shows and every song ever recorded; it’s where I do my writing and chatting and messaging; it’s where my notes and calendars and social networks live. It’s everything except fun.
I’ve been using the internet for almost 22 years now. Gross, right? Every year, things get less fun around here. Especially the last couple years.
Maybe I’m just getting older. Maybe the internet’s sense of whimsy really has been taken out behind the barn and left for dead. I don’t really know anymore.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
Getting wild with digital design in 2018 means getting wild in 2018 with responsive design that’s agnostic to the kind of device you’re rocking. That’s doable, probably, but it’s really, really hard.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object. It’s like the famous line from the Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
Hey, 2017.
You were, hands down, the worst year of my life. The more distance that I’m able to put between you and I, the better.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Some really great things happened this year. But the worst thing I’ve ever been through in my life — which I’d much rather be vague about than recount here — also happened on your watch. And while it’s hard to hold a year personally responsible for the circumstances that occurred in the middle of it, I still kind of do.
Irrational? Sure. But it’s easier than self-reflection, I guess.
Maybe, eventually, I’ll be able to look back and thank you for making me stronger. For helping forge me into a more resilient person. But the wounds are still too fresh, and my emotions are still too raw.
Here’s to hoping that 2018 treats me — and all of us — a little bit better.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
I’ve decided that 2018 is going to be a year of paring back.
Less junk.
Less apps.
Less podcasts.
Less distractions.
Less commitments.
Less eating out.
Less bullshit.
Less stress.
I’m not really interested in obsessively measuring how successful I am at doing any of these things. Mainly because of the “less stress” item on the list above. But I’ll still do my best to check in every once in a while.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
Because all of the other social networks have become a huge fucking bummer, I’ve been lurking on a new peer-to-peer social network, Rotonde.
Right now, the chatter over there is (mainly) a bunch of navel gazing around building Rotonde. But I kind of prefer people yapping about hacking on JavaScript to a shitload of emotionally exhausting politics talk anyway.
Nodes (or “portals”) on the Rotonde network are, as of now, only viewable from Beaker — a stripped down, desktop only, Chromium based web browser that supports the BitTorrent inspired Dat protocol. Thanks to the peer-to-peer nature of Dat, Beaker is able to act as:
A web browser.
A place to host JavaScript and/or basic HTML sites of your own.
A distributed cache of the other Dat sites you’ve recently visited.
An simpleish demonstration of everything listed above can be demonstrated by spinning up your own Rotonde instance. Want to try?
Select "Fork this site" from the menu at the end of the address bar and give your new site a name.
Select "Library" from the hamburger menu near the upper right corner.
Select the name of the site you just created from the list on the left.
In the right hand pane, you'll see a list of files. Clicking on the name of your site will open up your Rotonde portal.
Select the input field (near the top of the page) and press CTRL + SHIFT + DELETE. This will reset your Rotonde instance.
Refresh the page.
Enter edit:name example (replacing example with your own preferred username) in the input field and press RETURN.
Change your avatar by opening your Beaker Library, selecting "Open folder", and replacing media/content/icon.svg with an SVG file of your choosing. If you don't want to bother finding one, someone's already generated a bunch that you can use. Just make sure you publish your changes after you've found something you like, or nobody will ever see it.
Go follow some people by pasting their dat:// URL into the input field. I wouldn't be mad if you added me, but I also won't be offended if you don't. There's a list of known Rotonde portals here if you want to browse around and see what's going on.
Write a post or two.
Once you have everything dialed in, sign up for a Hashbase account to mirror your portal. That way, your Rotonde content stays browsable even if your copy of Beaker crashes (as it is currently wont to do) or you need to take your computer offline.
One of my favorite things about Rotonde is that updates to the underlying client and portal software get rolled out to the entire network as features are added. This means that you never have to worry about keeping your client up to date — it just always is.
While Rotonde has clearly got a way to go — those aforementioned browser crashes, the community is still figuring out mentions, discoverability and following aren’t very user friendly — I’m excited to kick back on the sidelines and watch it all take shape.
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴
There is no need to sharpen my pencils anymore. My pencils are sharp enough. Even the dull ones will make a mark.
Now’s as good a time as any for starting over, right? So let’s do something new. Something without all of the cruft. Something that doesn’t feel like an obligation or chore.
Honestly, I don’t even know what this is going to grow into. And I don’t know if we’re going to make it any further than a few days/weeks/months. But I’ve got an itch that I’ve been ignoring for far too long. So it’s either time to break out the Benadryl or get to scratching.
I know things are normally pretty quiet around here. But I have some actual, legitimate news.
In just a couple weeks, I’ll be joining the Managed WordPress team at Liquid Web as their Senior Performance Engineer. It’s an opportunity for me to get out of Marketing—where I’ve been broadening my skillset since last fall—and back into implementing things that impact users.
The decision to leave WP Engine was hard. In the five and a half years that I’ve been there, we’ve managed to grow the company from five employees in Austin (with me working remotely) to over four hundred and fifty across five offices in the US and Europe. I’m incredibly proud of what they’ve been able to build, as well as the hand that I’ve had in helping to do that.
However, when the opportunity came to work with the team that Chris Lema has put together, I couldn’t pass it up. It was simply too exciting.
So exciting that I don’t even know what else to say without turning this into a big, rambling, 4500-word post. Seriously. The previous revisions of this draft post go to some really weird places. And because I’m not really interested in tying my disjointed ideas together right now, I’ll spare everyone the word salad and post a GIF of how I’m feeling instead.
Maybe I’ll digest things a bit more and write about all of this later. Considering the last post I did here was in March, probably not. But hey, here’s to future aspirations…
I ran a few (incredibly unscientific) tests on Google’s new Guetzli JPEG encoder last night at 100%, 90%, and 84% compression. Why 84%? Well, that’s the lowest the Guetzli binary will let you go without editing the source and recompiling.
Each run (compressing a single image) took about 20 minutes on a medium sized cloud instance with 8GB of RAM. During these runs, the server routinely went into swap. If you’re interested in seeing how things panned out, here’s the output: https://img.boogah.org/g/
Included in the link above are 2 versions (lossless, and lossy) of the same image run through ImageOptim on macOS. Doing both of those took me less than 2 minutes, combined. And while the output of ImageOptim’s lossy compression isn’t near as sharp, it’ll still be “good enough” for most folks.
At the end of the day, Guetzli’s output is really nice. And it does do a great job compressing things. I saw anywhere from a 74.63% to 89.28% decrease in size from my original image with very few visual artifacts. In its current form, however, it takes way too long to act as an efficient enough batch processor for small, independent publishers.
So don’t go throwing away Kraken, Imagify, or Smush just yet… Especially if you post a lot of galleries. 😀
Maybe I’ll digest things a bit more and write about all of this later. Considering the last post I did here was in March, probably not. But hey, here’s to future aspirations…