A few notes from today, starting from our usual round of...
What have people been working on?
Paul - advancing on three websites, experimenting with Wordpress and Foundation, to try something new; also, web components for home and work.
Fran - hatched a long term plan of automatically generating difference sizes of a photo, for small screens, thumbnails, different formats, inspired by last month's discussion; for the moment, it works on book covers of trilogies only.
(Do we need a "well known" URL for profile pictures? Fran has avatar.jpg, James ended up with coffeeshop.webp)
James - also worked on images, and his website now automatically generates small/medium/large versions of all photos.
Pre-commit hooks are useful to re-compress images (e.g., with optipng)
Colin - trying new colour schemes for his website; tried with a picture-to-colours generator but the result wasn't great—colours are hard! He also disappeared down the "let's try Emacs!" rabbit hole.
Alistair - also trying new editors, and moving from VS Code to Jetbrain's web IDE, and a few more to complete the confusion.
Web components
AI editors: so much spent correcting wrong suggestions! Paul tried with web components (MDN), but feels like he hasn't learnt that much, just got some ready-made stuff for one case.
James disapponted by the requirement of having a dash in the name of a web component. Might change his name to include one, to work around <james> errors. He recently built a "what HTML tag are you?" quiz (see message above). Unfortunately it's not pure HTML, it needs some tricky Javascript to collect the weights of different answers.
And more...
Comments and reactions: discussions on social media disappear over time, but articles and comments on a website have a longer life.
You have one unicorn a month —Alistair
Alistair dealing with a website loading slowly in China. Traffic for things hosted ourside the country have to go through few connections to the outside of the country, which can be saturated at time. Performance improvements only help so much, and you need a licence to host a website in the country. Even huge companies have trouble getting things to work. See also Demystifying web performance in China by Jodie Chan.
Colin's blog post about programming knitting patterns and Rust code was accepted at an Open Source conference. He doesn't remember which one? đŸ¤”
And that's all! They haven't kicked us out yet, but we'd better leave the coffee shop at this point.
See you next time, possibly a writing session on the 11 March!