It’s been an interesting start to the day, one which has felt like 2008 all over again. I sat down at my desk with a morning coffee, opened my RSS feeds and went through opening stories into Safari when I came across something that seemed interesting. Two of those articles led me to two new blogs, personal blogs, from people I’ve never come across before. Now my feed reader has two extra subscriptions to keep track of.

Back in the early 2000’s while I was a student and at the start of my design career, this was a regular occurrence. Blogs would reveal more blogs, which would reveal more blogs, and at the end of it all I would feel inspired and ready to create a post for my own blog. Much like today. In that sense it feels like nothing has really changed. The internet, if we let it, can still serve up new surprises and new interesting people in a way that nothing else can. The small, personal, internet that is.

The last 15 years or so has been damaging to the personal internet. We have surrendered ourselves to the behemoths of social media, falling for the promise of easier connections, when in reality those connections are shallower and don’t last. People get drowned out in the noise and lost in the algorithm. That’s why mornings like this feel more special. Like a mini-revival is taking place. Most of the personal blogs I followed nearly 2 decades ago are gone now, sadly, but new ones are springing up and old timers are returning. People are scrabbling about in the back of the cupboard, finding the old hat buried at the back, dusting it off, giving it a clean, and starting again.

It actually makes me happy, which feels odd to write, but it’s true. I like finding new blogs to read, people to follow, photos to look at. It reminds me that despite all that’s going on in the world, it still keeps spinning. People keep creating, sharing their experiences, and more (please more) often than not there isn’t any politics in sight. It’s like a new renaissance is bubbling up, and I’m here for it.

It would be remiss of me not to mention the two new blogs I found that triggered this post:

• The first by a photographer called Adrian
• The second is by Bijan Sabet

Both linked to by Om on his new blog.

It’s a dark mode day. Outside is gloomy and grey, it’s raining, and everything feels like it’s in dark mode. There’s been a few of these kinds of day recently, normally they coincide with extrovert days at work, when my calendar is chock full of meetings and there’s no room to actually Do The Work.

Today is a bit different.

Whilst it’s a dark mode day outside, and consequently a dark mode day on my Mac I only have a couple of calls today so I have chance to find some flow. These days feel rare and for once I’m happy it’s a dark mode day. I can cocoon myself at my desk, headphones on, my time to work playlist in my ears and I’ll have a stretch of time to do some design work.

Barry Hess in a post about the state of his task manager makes the point that he is DDoS’ing himself with To-dos and Reminders. Essentially there is so much stuff in his task manager and he has lost trust in the way it works to ever see the right things at the right time.

I feel his pain. I have been bouncing around task managers for, at least, the last 6 months trying to find a way that works for me to see what I need to do at the right time. It feels that the biggest issue for me, is that as work dials up its corporate security it becomes harder to wrangle all the incoming jobs in one place. Tasks can be assigned to me in at least three different pieces of software, none of which are able to be integrated. On top of this I have the tasks coming in from chats and meetings, plus keeping track of and breaking down all the tasks into chunks that make them doable.

All of this leaves me with a constant feeling of overwhelm. There’s too much to do and no enough time to do it. There has to be a better way…

One of the most active blogs in my feed reader is by Louie Mantia. He has an interesting point of view that sometimes differs from mine (mainly politics) but I like what he creates and find it inspiring. In his recent post titled Learn to Code, Don’t Learn to Code he states this:

Both parties can understand the other’s limitations without learning how to do it themselves. And—in my opinion—you can more easily push the limitations without learning it.

I agree with this and it has been my experience as well. I can code html and css, but the developers I work with on a daily basis are far more skilled than I am. On the occasions where I’ve ceded to their wisdom we’ve ended up with a finished product that’s not quite as good as it could be. In contrast, the time when we’ve worked together to arrive at something closer to my design, we’ve ended up with a finished product that is better than what I created originally. When I’ve pushed them to see how close they can get to something I’ve designed, they’ve discovered that they can do more than they thought and then those new techniques have fed my designs and refined them further.

At work we’re doing a team visibility piece to help others in the business get to know us. We’ve been asked to answer some questions and I thought it would be fun to share them here…

Favourite movie: It would be a three way fight between The Usual Suspects, Shawshank Redemption, and The Dark Knight.

Tea or Coffee: Coffee, but not any coffee… my friends would say it has to be “snobby”!

Biggest fear: Wasps! Evil creatures.

What’s your idea of a perfect day? It’d have to be somewhere warm and starts with coffee looking out over a scenic view (mountains or sea), a long breakfast with friends, then an afternoon spent reading, before dinner out with friends.

How would friends describe you? I hope reliable and kind would be in there somewhere!

I’d love to hear some of your answers. If you want to share, please post them on your blog and link to this post.

I generally don’t comment about politics on social media, or really in life in general. I find the whole topic to be divisive and alienating especially as someone who is not liberal enough for the left and not conservative enough for the right, it is a hard topic to broach.

What I can say is this: I am very disappointed in the current state of politics both in the UK and USA. In the UK we have ended up with a government that will inflict great damage on society and is already doing so. In the US it feels like no matter the result, the same will be true.

I find myself wondering how it is two supposedly educated countries find that their choices for their political leaders are so poor, leaving voters with a bad and worse. My only hope is that we don’t see scenes in America similar to the last election and people manage to keep their heads screwed on.

I have this weird stumbling block with my blog. I want to blog, when I do it I enjoy it and when I get into a good rhythm posting regularly I enjoy it even more. I should then be doing it regularly, and in fact I want to do it regularly, but I have this weird block. I’m a designer. I don’t like using things out the box and prefer to have my own design on my own website, so when I don’t have one it becomes a blocker and I don’t want to invest time in blogging until it’s design is my own.

I can you asking, so why don’t you just get on with it and build your own design. And the answer is simple. My personal computer is an iPad and I’ve found it hard to get the right setup so that I an easily code up what’s in my mind, that’s not to say it’s not possible, just that I haven’t found something that clicks with me so far.

All this is really a long winded way of saying, it’s all just excuses. At the end of the day if I enjoy blogging and writing then I should get my finger out and do it. So here I am, trying again to find a rhythm and just do the blogging.

Life is odd. Sometimes it seems to just pass us by, each day sliding into the next, the week begins and ends before we’ve even had time to catch our breath. At other times the days are slow and packed with things, little moments that create memories or that build up to make a week to remember. Lately life seems to be passing by at a great rate of knots, it whizzes by in a string of meetings, groceries, tv shows, and sleep. There barely seems time to take a breath before the next thing starts.

Occasionally I become aware of this speed and force myself to find a slot in my calendar that allows me to sit and take a moment to be still. A moment to sit and calm myself. A moment to reach out to God and speak to him.

I’m trying to cultivate these moments. I want to have more of these pauses in my life, where I can sit and be, resting in the presence of my Lord and dwelling with Him. I’ve been listening to a series of 5 songs over the last week or so. They start with one of my favourite songs, Oceans, and then are followed in any order by 4 more. Sung by Anthem Worship the artwork that goes with them is a single flower photographed on a clean coloured background which complements the colour of the petals. Each manages to capture the feelings evoked by the music. When they play I find myself listening to the words and looking at the images, a small moment of still and quiet. Like a prayer they draw me to my God.

I have them saved as a playlist in Apple Music, it’s titled “Take a moment” and when I need too I can sit back for a moment and say to Siri. Play “Take a moment” and the songs come on, my iPhone displays the artwork as they play and I can pause and step away from the pace of life to find a moment of rest before resuming my day.

This is a post which I’ve had brewing in the back of my mind since September. This year marks the end of my 3rd decade, September will be my 40th birthday the end of what has turned out to be quite a hard decade. A look in the mirror and I can see how hard it has been.

At the start of the year I weighed myself and had a little bit of a shock. My weight hasn’t just gone up, it’s ballooned and I am the heaviest I have ever been by a large margin. What’s worse is that I look at photos of myself and am shocked at the size of my stomach and my physique. One thing is clear. It’s time to change and do something about it.

This week I’m going to begin a trifecta of things. I’m going to start tracking what I’m eating and how much. I eat a lot of fresh food, but also a lot of convenience food, so that needs to change. My initial aim with tracking what I’m eating is to make myself more aware and then to try and make some more healthier choices.

Secondly I’m going to drink more water. I have a large water bottle that can hold two litres of water. I’m going to build a routine of filling that up first thing in the morning and finishing it by the end of the day. If I want something sweeter or a soft drink I will go for sparkling water and a slice of fruit.

Thirdly, I need to start exercising. I optimistically joined a gym back in September and have been a grand total of once a month since. I’m going to cancel my membership and use the money to subscribe to Fitbod instead. Then I am going to add calendar appointments for workouts throughout the week.

I’m sharing this in an effort to try and build a commitment with myself. I plan to share my progress each month with how I’m doing on each of these three fronts. If I can establish some good habits in the next month I will start to share some of the statistics around my weight, but for now this is all I’m comfortable sharing.

One of my aims for this year is to try and develop some more healthy foundations or habits in my life. For many years now I’ve wanted to blog more regularly like I did in the very early days of discovering what the small web could be. It was a place of individuals sharing their lives and thoughts on their own websites. Comments were on, people linked to each other, and a feeling of community developed.

In the years since my blog has been through many incarnations, it’s been Wordpress powered, Jekyll powered, Micro.blog, and back to Wordpress. But one thing for certain is that posting over the last decade has dwindled to almost nothing, but with the odd renaissance here and there. The desire to blog has always been there but for one reason or another never lasted, or more accurately I was never able to form it into a habit like I used too.

Over the last year I’ve noticed a significant change in what I call the small web. I’ve found a lot more personal blogs who post regularly and, most importantly, interesting content. It’s sparked my creativity again, and so I’m taking some steps to start again.

One of the barriers that I’ve struggled with over the last years is that I’ve wanted my blog to be too complicated. I wanted to have small posts to replace twitter, links to be bookmarks, as well as a place to share my work, and write longer posts like this one. What I’ve realised is that when I enjoyed blogging in the early days (2007ish era) it was a lot simpler. To begin with I had one post type and it was a lot easier and a lot more fun. I realised that I needed to return to that level of simplicity if I was ever going to form a new habit of blogging regularly. So that’s what I’m doing.

I’ve installed a new theme that takes away the temptation to try and add new types of posts and instead places an emphasis on writing blog posts. So that’s what I intend to do with more regularity.

I’ve begun the long process of adding in some of my old posts from previous iterations of this site. My apologies if this triggers a load of posts in your RSS. I’m working backwards, and I’ve now added all the posts from 2023 and 2022. It will be a slow process as I’ve decided to add each post manually, importing from the markdown file I have saved. Initially I am just adding the more formal posts but may go back and add all the link posts I’ve made at some point.

It’s been about one month since I restarted my blog back on Wordpress. I say restarted rather than moved because so far I’ve yet to add all my old posts to the archive, something I still plan to do, but which I’ve yet to find the time for.

The change was triggered by a combination of things, but the chief ones were ease of posting and familiarity. I used Wordpress for well over a decade on this blog and a number of other websites I’ve built over the years. I’ve had dalliances with other CMS’s but ultimately the ecosystem which surrounds Wordpress has pulled me back in. The apps I like to use to write are well integrated making it easy to post from my Mac, iPad, or even iPhone if I wish and it’s helped. I may not be posting quite as often as I wanted too when I made the change, but I have posted more to my blog in the last month than I did in the last year. As far as I am concerned that’s a win, and importantly the lack of friction has fuelled my motivation and desire to post more.

Combined with this change to my blog setup I’ve been making greater use of RSS over the last few months. In fact my use of RSS was one of the things that fuelled the move back to Wordpress. I’ve found myself returning to a habit I had many years ago. I would ease into my work day with a coffee and my RSS, saving longer posts to read later, reading shorter posts, and sharing the most interesting links through my blog. It’s a nice way to begin the day before a barrage of meetings, and a good way to stay on top of any industry related news. I’ve a feeling it’s going to stick around, and hopefully that means good things for my blog as well.

I really like blog posts that give a behind the scenes for design changes. I’ve just written an internal post for my work on the reasoning I’ve made changes to a key part of our user experience.

This is an interesting look at the effect of a new icon design for Foodnoms has increased downloads. I wish more developers and designers would be this transparent about their work. It’s great evidence that shows how important the users are in our design considerations. No matter how well you know your users you don’t know what’s the most effective design until you speak to them.

When I started this site, I was just a 19-year-old looking to have fun on the internet. After all the twists and turns, I’ve come back around to a very similar place. Now, I’m a 31-year-old who’s still looking to have fun on the internet, share my thoughts and experiences, and make friends. That’s what this blog is for, and I’m really happy with where it’s landed.

Devon Dundee posting about his journey with his blog tells a similar tale to the story of my blog. Mine started when I was 20 and has been through many different iterations since. I recently switched back to WordPress in an effort to return to an easy way to post, have fun, and have a place to share that’s mine and no one else’s.

This is a fascinating read that presents the idea that calendars should be multi layered.

We tend to think of calendars as 2D grids with mutually exclusive blocks of time, but as this example shows, not all events automatically cancel each other out. Depending on their characteristics, they can be layered on top of each other. This means we manage time in three, not two, dimensions.

Think of a meeting you need to travel to. In your calendar will be an event for the actual meeting, but you need to block off time before and after so that no one else schedules something in that time. So really the unavailable time covers when you start travelling, the meeting itself, and the time travelling back. The total time makes one layer, the meeting is a second layer, and perhaps some tasks you need to accomplish in the meeting are a third layer. It’s a great concept and one I would love to see someone build an app based on it.

Back on Wordpress. It’s been a few years and many attempts to revitalise my blog, but I’ve decided to move back to Wordpress. The ease of posting from any device using apps has trumped everything else. Things will be a bit rough over the next few days and weeks as I get old posts back but stay tuned for more.

Just saw a a post on Threads from Figma… describe your creative process in three words or less.

My attempt: Steal, splice, iterate.

Maybe I should elaborate?

Steal: Be inspired. Steal ideas from others, but also from your past. At the start, or even in the middle of, a project I tend to ask myself two questions. Have I solved a similar problem in the past and has someone else solved it? If the answer to either of those questions is yes or maybe, then I look at those projects through he lens of the one I’m working on.

Splice: This is where I take what I’ve discovered when looking back at what has been done before and splice in new thoughts and ideas.

Iterate: This is pretty self explanatory, but essentially I spend the rest of the time repeating the process until I come to a point where I have something that is hitting the problem head on and the design is coming to a resolution.

I’ve seen a few posts from people sharing where they’ve been and thought it was interesting. So I’m sharing the countries I’ve been too as well:

• Denmark 🇩🇰
• France 🇫🇷
• Switzerland 🇨🇭
• Israel 🇮🇱
• Italy 🇮🇹

I’ve also stepped foot in Belgium and Luxembourg but they were both on the way to Switzerland so I don’t count them.

When I was growing up we had most of our family holidays in the UK and I think I’ve visited nearly all the counties in England, most of Wales, and a couple in Scotland.

I’ve been looking at some of the things Google announced this week. Whilst some of the things are quite interesting – like the Pixel Tablet and stand – others are just plain puzzling.

I understand that Google was is trying to flex and show off their AI abilities, the new Magic Editor that they announced doesn’t sit well with me. I take photos to preserve memories. I can look back through my photo library and memories are triggered by the visuals, even the ones that are less than perfect.

Showing off the capabilities of their new photo editor, Google talked about how we want things to always look good. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s not how life is. Not every day is sunny and bright, but Google is giving us the ability to make it appear like it is. Take a cloudy overcast day, there may be some really fun things that happen but it looks a bit grey. Google wants to make it easy for us to edit that photo and make it sunny with ease. It creates a disconnect with reality. The images of our memories won’t match.

Social media already causes a lot of people to live their life in a highly edited false way. Making it easier to trick ourselves into remembering something in a completely different way isn’t necessarily a good thing.

This post was written when this blog was based on Jekyll before I moved back to Wordpress. I have kept it as part of the history of this blog.

It’s taken me a long time with lots of googling and trial & error, but I finally have tags working on this site.

Out of the box Jekyll provides a tagging function. You can define tags at the start of blog posts along with the other data you wish to add, but annoyingly Jekyll doesn’t automatically provide archive pages.

When I first built this version of my site I started to add tags to my blog posts. I managed to figure out how to display them on each posts page but that was as far as I got. I made a couple of attempts at adding the functionality I wanted to the tags in the form of a page for each tag that lists the post attached to the tag. I wanted people to be able to click on the tags at the bottom of the posts and go to the tag page, and I wanted to list all the tags in use on the site in the archive page.

Finally today I came across this list of Jekyll plugins. In the list was a plugin designed to generate archive pages for years, months, days, categories, and tags. With the aim of todays tinkering focused on getting tags working I limited the archive plugin to just generate the pages for tags. Joyfully it worked first time. It took me some playing around with the templates to get them looking how I wanted, but I had pages generated for each tag and links to each page from the bottom of the posts.

The final task was getting a list of tags on the archive page. It took a lot of googling and faffing but eventually I managed to achieve what I wanted.

Now I just have to spend a bit of time making sure everything is tagged up as I want before I can explore how to make use of the tags in other ways.

For the last few years 99% of my personal computing has been handled on the iPad Pro. For the most part it was ok. Sometimes I would need to jump through some hoops to do things and occasionally I would fall back on my work Mac. The only item that has suffered in that time has been my ability to work on my personal website.

I tried several times to build workflows in shortcuts to enable me to do what I wanted, but most of the time they were buggy or didn’t quite work how I needed them too. Sadly, the outcome more often than not, was abandonment and my site fell into disrepair and neglect.

At the start of 2023 I decided I needed to revive some hobbies. One of the biggest, longest, and most enjoyable hobbies I’ve had has been running my own personal website or blog. So I’ve dusted off my old MacBook Pro and begun to play around once again. It’s been fun and refreshing and I now find myself wanting to write more as well. Having a thing that I’ve built as a home on the web seems to make a big difference in how much I want to write things to publish.

Sadly, using my MacBook Pro (from 2015) has shown me why I wanted to replace it with my iPad. I like the flexibility of the iPad, I can draw on it, I can write on it, I can do nearly everything I want to on it, except code and build a website. But my Mac is showing its age. It can’t run the latest version of macOS which makes me nervous. It means it will stop receiving security updates and apps will eventually not be able to receive updates. I’ve already experienced a couple having to roll back to older versions because they won’t run.

As a result the Apple website has become a place I visit often. The new M2 MacBook Air looks very appealing, but it’s not cheap, and given the current climate, out of reach at the moment. So I find myself eyeing my iPad Pro again. Then I get frustrated that I can’t do what I want to on it, which, when you think about the fact it has been around for over a decade, is kind of crazy that the device is still so hamstrung.

I know that bemoaning the state of the iPad a common theme at the moment, but I’m genuinely frustrated that the device continues to be held back by software deficiencies and design. It’s more than capable of doing all the things I can do on my old MacBook Pro in terms of hardware, but it remains shackled with one hand behind its back. For now I will continue to tinker with my site on my Mac, and then find ways to write and post to this site from my iPad. While I do that I’ll sit in hope that Apple eventually takes off the chains of iPadOS.

I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour or whether it’s seeing some people I know have their artwork displayed in a local gallery. It creates a spark in me. A desire to create things.

I’m inspired.

Except.

When I sit down with my notebook and pencil or my iPad and Apple Pencil I don’t know what to draw. I know I want to draw something but I don’t know what. So instead I turn to Ulysses and I write something. That’s fine, I enjoy it, but I want to draw something. I want to create something visual. Maybe I’m out of practice. I’ve spent so many years creating websites and designs for other people that when it comes to creating something for myself I have no idea where to start. I’m paralysed by the blank page. So I’m finding myself trying to research the drawing process. What can I create and how do I work out what I want to create? Maybe it’s a case of picking up my pencil and drawing, letting it wander around the page and seeing what emerges? At the very least it would be a start. Some marks being made. Let’s see…

I’ve been feeling the desire to create more since the start of the year. I’m not sure if it’s just because it’s a new year which often brings with it a fresh vigour or whether it’s seeing some people I know have their artwork displayed in a local gallery. It creates a spark in me. A desire to create things.

I’m inspired.

Except.

When I sit down with my notebook and pencil or my iPad and Apple Pencil I don’t know what to draw. I know I want to draw something but I don’t know what. So instead I turn to Ulysses and I write something. That’s fine, I enjoy it, but I want to draw something. I want to create something visual. Maybe I’m out of practice. I’ve spent so many years creating websites and designs for other people that when it comes to creating something for myself I have no idea where to start. I’m paralysed by the blank page. So I’m finding myself trying to research the drawing process. What can I create and how do I work out what I want to create? Maybe it’s a case of picking up my pencil and drawing, letting it wander around the page and seeing what emerges? At the very least it would be a start. Some marks being made. Let’s see…

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to find a new way of doing social media some of the things that social media gets right keep cropping up in my feeds.

The first is that social media made it easy to follow people. Mastodon is not intuitive in how it handles following people across it’s many instances. RSS is great for following individual blogs as long as you have the necessary infrastructure in place (an account to act as a sync service and some apps to read in), but even then it’s not always easy to subscribe to the RSS feed of a website.

Go back a decade or so and browsers were heading in an interesting direction. Safari on the Mac had RSS built in and Firefox had a feature called live bookmarks. Both allowed you to “bookmark” a website and the browser would automatically use the RSS link it found on the site and notify you when there was an update. To me this is the most logical place to integrate RSS or a “follow” button for the internet. What was missing was some king of home page or feed akin to an RSS readers or that of Twitter. Browsers of today offer a great experience for browsing the open web, or at least starting a Google search and going from there. What I would like to see is a browser that places as much emphasis on bringing a social experience to the open web.

Imagine this… you are browsing the internet and come across a new blog, you’d like to follow it so you click the follow button in the header of that website. The UI of the website reflects that and your browser adds the website as website to it’s bookmarks. You close the browser and go off to do something else. A while later you come back, click on your browser icon and instead of being greeted by Google you are met with a feed reader type UI that shows you recent updates from the sites you follow. This is your curated space but it’s all tracked and kept in sync by your web browser not a social network. I think that would be an interesting way of handling social stuff on the web, the browser would be your home and not just a gateway to everything.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about social media and the open (indie) web. As people are fleeing Twitter and flocking towards Mastodon in an attempt to find a new way of doing social media some of the things that social media gets right keep cropping up in my feeds.

The first is that social media made it easy to follow people. Mastodon is not intuitive in how it handles following people across it’s many instances. RSS is great for following individual blogs as long as you have the necessary infrastructure in place (an account to act as a sync service and some apps to read in), but even then it’s not always easy to subscribe to the RSS feed of a website.

Go back a decade or so and browsers were heading in an interesting direction. Safari on the Mac had RSS built in and Firefox had a feature called live bookmarks. Both allowed you to “bookmark” a website and the browser would automatically use the RSS link it found on the site and notify you when there was an update. To me this is the most logical place to integrate RSS or a “follow” button for the internet. What was missing was some king of home page or feed akin to an RSS readers or that of Twitter. Browsers of today offer a great experience for browsing the open web, or at least starting a Google search and going from there. What I would like to see is a browser that places as much emphasis on bringing a social experience to the open web.

Imagine this… you are browsing the internet and come across a new blog, you’d like to follow it so you click the follow button in the header of that website. The UI of the website reflects that and your browser adds the website as website to it’s bookmarks. You close the browser and go off to do something else. A while later you come back, click on your browser icon and instead of being greeted by Google you are met with a feed reader type UI that shows you recent updates from the sites you follow. This is your curated space but it’s all tracked and kept in sync by your web browser not a social network. I think that would be an interesting way of handling social stuff on the web, the browser would be your home and not just a gateway to everything.