I've had some more development time open up this month at short notice.

Give me a shout if you've got any Laravel, WordPress, Craft projects (or anything PHP or JavaScript flavoured!) that might need some dev attention.

Tried @cred.blue and seems like a healthy score of 431!

Some thoughts:

I'm not a huge fan of "Klout" style scoring on social media BUT it's something that people do want. People love rankings, they love metrics, they love to see their place in the world.

What they don't want is unfairness...

i.e. bigger accounts that get boosts by merit of being richer people IRL, louder people, more abrasive and obnoxious people.

I think it's really cool that it gives a lot of context to the score too, explains e.g. ALT text, activity, encourages AT Proto involvement (still figuring that out!)...

Gearing up for a good end to the week with some Friday momentum..

- Doing some research into a potential very cool project

- WordPress updates (when are there never WordPress things to be doing!)

- Laravel project work

Then weekend time! (More work haha)

Interesting thoughts on AI in this thread. I’m cynical of it myself but very aware of its potential - and the massive potential for misuse, abuse and simple misinterpretation of it, which happens a lot

Powerful but dangerous tech, for many obvious and not so obvious reasons.

One worry is what it does to executive functions. How does reliance of overuse of these things change how you think, even who you are as a person?

There’s going to be a lot of research done on the effects of this stuff on humanity. Never before have we been able to replace thinking wholesale

Engagement on an “algorithm-free” site like Bluesky is interesting.

I assume a big factor is “active minutes” (a stat not often shown for social sites)

Do people spend fewer active minutes when there’s more aggravating news around? (ie now)

Does that reduce likelihood of a post being seen?

Or in other words, even with apparent growth, it might still seem like there’s more significant peaks and troughs since there’s no artificial algorithm to give a false impression of activity?

(I believe the Bluesky approach is far healthier btw. If it’s quieter, just log off for a little bit)

Building a tool like "Hilite Everything" opens up a whole load of interesting of challenges:

1. It's very visual & artistic. Keeping that coherent through future updates could be tricky!

Say I want to make a change to how parts of the code work. It might change functionality but *also* aesthetics.

2. Ease of use - I want to make it programmatical and also very powerful, but keep the range of options simple and - vitally - within a certain parameter range so that, again, in future, code updates can work within a well-known range.

Remember - a feature is for life, not just for Christmas!

Promoting things is hard!

People need to see something immediately that gives them an immediate know-and-tell so they know what your thing does and want to tell others about it

I've put a little interactive button on my "Hilite everything" landing page: https://solarise.dev/hilite

I've been asking myself whether or not this is something people actually want in a must-have product sort of sense (no) or if it's something that I can turn a profit on eventually? (haha, no)

I'm literally just building this because it's fun and daft and makes me smile.

Do more of that.

I finally decided to move away from my relatively expensive dedicated WordPress hosting for my own site (which is great hosting! But I don't need it) and instead set up a $5/month Vultr instance which is perfect for me. Took about 20 mins to set up with a free control panel, so well worth it.

Gonna take the money I saved moving from my old host and buy, I dunno... an egg?

Tired: finely tuned high performance admin panel

Wired: just stuff a load of config params in pastebin and let my site backend parse it

So my plan is basically to publish some of my threaded Bluesky posts on my site as a microblog.

Main issues are obviously (1) how to read the data - a tech issue and (2) how to select specific threads

Just having a basic text file which I paste a post ID into when I want to publish it works great!

I figured out how to make a far better cup of coffee with my Moka pot this morning - adding an Aeropress filter! (it filters out the bitter oils, a more consistent brew and I reduced the temperature slightly)

With thanks to @jameshoffmann.bsky.social https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfDLoIvb0w4

#coffee

I'm trying to recall a drag-and-drop HTML builder I saw ages ago and it was the wildest thing ever. Had real strong MySpace-layout energy. It was great fun, but I can't find it again.

Every result is "Hey! Build your site with us today *shows you the most boring marketing layout you've ever seen*"

I'm looking into what's available in terms of "no knowledge, just want to have fun and create something wild" beginner website building tools, and all I find are the usual frameworks that say they make things easy but in reality there's 29 layers of widgets and complexity.

Where's the good stuff?

An M.C. Escher-esque interactive experiment I made entirely with #CSS (No #Javascript involved! This is all styling)

You can play with it here: https://codepen.io/solarisedesign/pen/QbXLrZ

(might not work properly on every browser)

Another one from the #JavaScript archives

Part of a larger project, I built a colour/palette manager that lets you adjust all the colours individually, also adjust the proportion of each colour and easily add/remove/edit colours

Saves them automatically to a database too

#JavaScript #Laravel

Again, another just-for-fun thing that never quite saw the light of day!

But I'm planning on releasing this as a standalone component at some point.

A work in progress - an older project that I started last year, hoping to tidy it up and release soon.

It's a dynamic highlighting library - adds on-the-fly highlights to text (they adapt to e.g. responsive text size, line breaks, HTML tags)

Built for fun but might be useful!

#JavaScript

Working on my new website tonight. Will mostly be business, but also showing personal projects and artworks I've made in the past. Feels like it's coming together well, a work-in-progress.

I'm also planning using Bluesky as a microblogging tool. Pulling in select threads of mine as formatted text.

I've considered a few different ways of doing that. One was to manually select posts to add to the site, but that was a bit of a hassle - and I'm terrible with friction, makes things fall by the wayside!

The cleanest solution seems to be if I sign off with a little emoji (bear with me!)

Pondering board games again this morning.

Pondering board game inserts. Custom box layouts to optimise card and component storage. I fear I’m getting in too deep!

I’m fascinated by tabletop game design though, down to thinking about even how easy it is to store, align, organise box content

So much work goes into these things. You have to consider the amount of time it takes to set up a game and tidy after.

A cool game mechanic may work on paper but what if it then means spending twice as long organising parts?

And then there’s the production, printing, manufacturing pipeline.

Pushing a website live this morning to replace an existing one. No worries. It's fine. No stress. Always good to give my adrenal glands an unscheduled workout.

(ofc it did all go to plan, as these things often do!)

Are we heading back to a more decentralised web?

People on all sides clearly becoming more frustrated with big tech (or becoming more subsumed by it)

Is a return to a more personal internet on the cards?

I'll likely be focusing a lot more on #Laravel and @craftcms.com projects for the foreseeable future.

I'm still doing WordPress work but in more of a support/maintenance capacity, not so much new developments.

If you're looking for a developer to help with any of these things, let's chat!