A lot of CSS related posts this week. Also, Astro v2.0 was released this week. I&#39;ve been toying with building something in it, and it looks like it&#39;s added a bunch of good stuff. And one of my favorite games as a kid has been re-launched on the Xbox and the Switch!
<h2 id="in-depth">In Depth</h2>
&lt;InDepthNotes
 source=&quot;Antoine Toulon&quot;
 title=&quot;Don&#39;t target 100% coverage&quot;
 url=&quot;<a href="https://dev.to/antoinecoulon/dont-target-100-coverage-387o&quot;">https://dev.to/antoinecoulon/dont-target-100-coverage-387o&quot;</a>
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<pre><code>I gave a talk to my company about unit testing last year and one thing that stood out to me was the idea that 100% coverage doesn&#39;t always mean “good code”, but low coverage is a sign of potential issues. Antoine echoes that sentiment and is right here pointing out that just because you have 100% coverage, doesn&#39;t mean that the tests are useful.
</code></pre>
</InDepthNotes>

<h2 id="link-blast">Link Blast</h2>
<h3 id="👨🏼💻-software-development--design">👨🏼‍💻 Software Development &amp; Design</h3>
<a href="https://www.simplethread.com/20-things-ive-learned-in-my-20-years-as-a-software-engineer/">20 Things I&#39;ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer</a> (Justin Etheredge)
<a href="https://blog.silverorange.com/efficiency-over-performance">Efficiency over performance</a> (Steven Garrity)
<a href="https://anthonyhobday.com/sideprojects/saferules/">Visual design rules you can safely follow every time</a> (Anthony Hobday)
<a href="https://www.stefanjudis.com/blog/a-css-based-background-grid-generator/">A CSS-based background grid generator</a> (Stefan Judis)
<a href="https://daverupert.com/2023/01/css-wishlist-2023/">CSS Wishlist 2023</a> (Dave Rupert)
<a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio/keyboard-shortcuts-to-master-your-git-flow-in-visual-studio/">Keyboard Shortcuts to Master Your Git Flow in Visual Studio</a> (Jessie Houghton)
<a href="https://astro.build/blog/astro-2/">Astro 2.0</a> (Fred Schott)
<a href="https://ishadeed.com/article/conditional-css/">Conditional CSS</a> (Ahmad Shadeed)
<a href="https://andrewlock.net/series/behind-the-scenes-of-minimal-apis/">Behind the scenes of minimal APIs</a> (Andrew Lock)
<h3 id="🖥-technology--the-internet">🖥 Technology &amp; the Internet</h3>
<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt">Google is freaking out about ChatGPT</a> (Richard Lawler &amp; James Vincent)
<a href="http://www.righto.com/2023/01/inside-globus-ink-mechanical-navigation.html">Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight</a> (Ken Shirriff]
<a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/24/23568901/microsoft-edge-tab-split-window-feature">Microsoft Edge will soon let you split two tabs in a single window</a> (Tom Warren)
<h3 id="🎮-gaming">🎮 Gaming</h3>
<a href="https://www.polygon.com/23573980/goldeneye-controls-switch-xbox">GoldenEye controls better on Xbox than on Switch</a> (Old Welsh)
<h3 id="📈-business--finance">📈 Business &amp; Finance</h3>
<a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/01/26/the-humbling-of-goldman-sachs?etear=nl_weekly_1">The humbling of Goldman Sachs</a> (The Economist)
<h3 id="🔬-science">🔬 Science</h3>
<a href="https://www.planetary.org/articles/a-deep-dive-into-the-neptune-system-with-jwst">A deep dive into the Neptune system with JWST</a> (Heidi Hammer &amp; Naomi Rowe-Gurney)
<a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/volcanic-activity-on-mars-upends-red-planet-assumptions/">Volcanic Activity on Mars Upends Red Planet Assumptions</a> (Phil Plait)
<h3 id="🎧-podcasts">🎧 Podcasts</h3>
<a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/01/20/1150332566/charles-ponzi-financial-scam">Planet Money #1608: Charles Ponzi&#39;s scheme</a>
<h3 id="🎒-everything-else">🎒 Everything Else</h3>
<a href="https://georgestocker.com/2023/01/22/can-we-kill-the-word-project-please/">Can we kill the word &#39;project&#39; please?</a> (George Stocker)
<h3 id="🎵-a-song-to-leave-you-with">🎵 A Song to Leave You With</h3>
<h4 id="goldeneye-007-n64---full-soundtrack">GoldenEye 007 N64 - Full Soundtrack</h4>
<YouTubeEmbed
 id="M1MPVbZ-vTg"
 title="GoldenEye 007 N64 - Full Soundtrack"
/>

A lot of CSS related posts this week. Also, Astro v2.0 was released this week. I&#39;ve been toying with building something in it, and it looks like it&#39;s added a bunch of good stuff. And one of my favorite games as a kid has been re-launched on the Xbox and the Switch!

Reading Log - January 27 (#16)

As you can tell, I&#39;ve decided to give my blog a little bit of a facelift.
The primary reason I decided to do this was that I realized I basically made my posts dependent upon having an image for every blog post, and in some cases, limited how long the opening of my posts could be. If I didn&#39;t make it fall within these constraints, the alignment of the boxes would end up being off. It wasn&#39;t really a long-term solution that worked. I decided that a redesign was in order.
I&#39;m definitely happy with how this design came out. I had a sidebar a little while back, and decided that I&#39;d go back to a sidebar design. I searched around Dribble and other blogs I follow to see what others have done to try to come up with something for me.
I decided to go with a sticky sidebar. I figured that if it wasn&#39;t sticky, you&#39;d have a bunch of dead space on the left of the page once you scrolled down. I didn&#39;t like the feel of that so I made the sidebar stick to the side of the page so at least it wasn&#39;t blank.
On mobile, the sidebar slims down and becomes the header. I was slightly concerned that too much of the main page would end up cut off from the header. In the end, outside the iPhone SE, enough below the header was visible that I decided that the design would work.
I might end up doing something different for the photography page, but I like the way the design turned out for the blog portion of my site.
I think another, probable less glamorous part of it is that I can never seem to stick with a design. After a while, I just want to dig in and redesign it. I wish I would end up spending more time writing posts rather than re-writing the code behind it.

Another Redesign

Over the course of the last several months, I’ve been busy building out my website utilizing <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Jekyll</a> instead of Wordpress. It’s not my first time moving away from Wordpress, but I think it will end up being permanent.
I do want to write more and I do hope to do so soon, but the fact of the matter is that in all honesty, I really don&#39;t blog as much as I want. This lack of posts has the distinct advantage of trying in with what was the biggest difference to me between Jekyll and WordPress. Jekyll does not use or require a database.
Instead, it uses files to identify the individual pages and posts. Want to add a new post? Just add a file to the posts folder with a given filename format. Jekyll is part of a new <a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-website-generators-next-big-thing/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">trend with static website generators</a> and I have to say that for my current needs, this works out perfectly.
Because Jekyll just uses files to handle the posts, it makes backing up much simpler. Hell, I can just keep everything in a Git repository and I&#39;m good to go...which is exactly what I do.
As for the design, I decided I wanted something a little more simple. I do love the cover images, but decided that want really what I wanted for the new look. I decided I liked the idea of a short summary about myself in a sidebar with the main content in the main section. It&#39;s simple, and in my humble opinion, elegant. I didn&#39;t want to get rid of images completely and I wanted to keep something there to continue the &quot;feel&quot; of a cover image without actually having a cover image. To do this, I decided to add an image header to pages and posts that was easily able to be customized, but yet still compelling. I actually like it because I can change it between a 1, 2 or 3 image header very easily.
I still have a few things I want to do to improve it. It is responsive, and looks good on both desktop and mobile. The images however, could be better optimized, so I’ll probably do what I can to improve that for mobile once the holiday season is over and things calm down some. I want to make a few CSS tweaks here and there as well, but nothing major. The only thing I’m still debating on is whether I want to bother with comments. I’m leaning against it at the moment figuring people can get a hold of me on <a href="https://www.twitter.com/kpwags" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Twitter</a> or other social media channels if they want, but of course I could change my mind down the road.
As part of this change I also ended up moving my hosting from Rackspace to Amazon Web Services. I&#39;ve been meaning to look into AWS and finally decided to give it a try. Having your own server is convenient, but there&#39;s something to be said to not have to worry about it when you&#39;re only running a simple blog. I still have other sites on Rackspace, but we&#39;ll see how long they remain there.
Let me know what you think.

Redesigned Again

This has been in the works for some time now.
I decided I wanted a better <a href="http://kpwags.com/photography">photography site</a> first, and then along the way I decided that maybe I should short of unite the two. My blog had its own simplistic look, and my photography site was just out there with no real tie to my blog other than my name being in the header.
The first thing that really made me want to move past my old photography site was The Daily Shot. It was a good idea, at least I think it was, but I found that I never really found all that much to take photos of. That, and I felt like the photos I were taking were becoming more and more repetitive.
The second thing was that the site just felt clunky to me. I developed it to try and keep it as a one page site more or less, but never really felt that it worked all that well, especially factoring in the responsiveness of the website.
So I decided to scrap The Daily Shot and start from scratch with building a new site. I wanted something that was visual and really stood out. I figured all I really needed was two pages. An index to give a little blurb about me and my journey into photography, and a dynamic album page to display each album.
The index page wasn&#39;t all that hard to figure out, but I decided that breaking the albums down by year might be helpful especially with tracking the journey and my improvement (hopefully) with my picture taking skills.
The next part was building the individual album page. I wanted something that would stand out and really grab the attention of the visitor. I decided to go with a cover image since they&#39;re both visual and a great way to describe the album.
Once I got the cover idea nailed down, it was onto laying out the grid of photos which was super simple in comparison to figuring out the best way to do the cover responsively. The only decision I had was what do I want to have happen when a user clicks on a photo. I was thinking about adding a page for the photo but figured that would be overkill since it&#39;s not like I&#39;m adding the ability to comment on them, so I just went with a lightbox to make out simple.
I really do like the way it turned out. I feel like the visuals really stand out and sort of draw the eyes in.
This led to the blog itself, I liked how the photography portion turned out so much, I decided that while I was at it, I would give my blog a facelift.
The first thing I decided to do was get rid of the categories. I originally liked that idea, but over time and really not writing all that much, I decided that they really didn&#39;t work for what I was focusing on. I also decided that I really liked the cover look of my photography redesign so I wanted to keep up the theme. Having a full screen image for the homepage made perfect sense. Having a full screen image for the about and contact pages didn&#39;t make as much sense so I decided to just have the images take up roughly one third of the screen. The biggest challenge I had was for posts. I wanted to do full screen, but figured I wouldn&#39;t always have a good image for each post or that maybe some posts wouldn&#39;t really be long enough or even warrant one.
My solution I think was a good one. I essentially have two “categories” right now. I put categories in quotes because they aren&#39;t categories that you would think. They&#39;re really just a type of post. One is called a Post, the other a Blurb. Posts are the longer, posts (like this one) while Blurbs are there for entries that tend to be shorter and maybe not as lengthy. Posts will have full screen covers, while blurbs will just have the smaller header image. I felt like this was a nice compromise that gave me the best of both worlds.
I did my best to test this across devices, so if you see something wonky or something that doesn&#39;t look right, please let me know. Just let me know what browser/device you&#39;re using so I can try to narrow down where the issue is.
You can check out my photography site <a href="https://kpwags.com/photography">here</a>.

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Reading Log - January 27 (#16)

Another Redesign

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Reading Log - January 27 (#16)

Another Redesign

Redesigned Again

The Redesign

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