📷 Happy New Year from the top of SoCal!

📷 Happy New Year from the top of SoCal!
I’m beginning the new year (a tad early) with a plan to read the LOTR storyline, starting with The Silmarillion. I’m a fan of the movies and read The Hobbit some 20 years ago, so I decided now was as good a time as any to tackle the task of actually reading all the books.
New theme for my site completed and installed. I like where it ended up. In total, less than 250 lines of CSS, including style reset and comments. I still have to add a dark mode media query, but that’s a small task for later.
Today’s challenge: Create a new responsive Micro.blog theme for my site using as little CSS as possible. I’m liking where this is going…
I just released a minor update to my Tinylytics for Micro.blog plugin that refactors some logic, squishes a couple small bugs and updates display labels. Look for v3.1.1 in your plugins area soon. If you want to see what changed specifically, check out the pull request on Github.
Our Holiday tradition… A pot of homemade Christmas chili.
Yep… I had to get in on it too. My bass-playing Funko Box alter ego.
Super excited to share that I’ve got a full functioning WordPress plugin for Tinylytics committed to its dev repository. If you have a WordPress site too, and want to give it a spin, hit me up.
Got a basic POC WordPress plugin for Tinylytics working in my dev environment this morning. Might put a little more effort into it over the next few weeks, but I’m really looking to unplug until after the first of the year. Progress though, and that’s all that counts.
Mission accomplished. 🎉 All projects have been successfully deployed to production environments ahead of the end of year code freeze on Monday. A total grind over the last three months to get here, but it’s paid off. Encouraged to know there is not one thing on the agenda for tomorrow.
Wednesday, December 13, 2023 →
I’ve been coveting a particular domain name for almost 25 years. After asking a few times over the last six, I’ve finally gotten the current owner to agree to sell it to me. The waiting to finalize the deal is killing me. I really, really, really want this domain…
Dragging a crap-ton of RSS feeds from an OPML file import into a folder all at once?
📷 Bear with me a minute…
📷 Campground peacock.
I don’t know why this just came to my mind, but I would absolutely love to have a Six Million Dollar Man metal lunchbox to bring my lunches to work in…
Uh oh… My mind has latched on to a Micro.blog theme idea this morning and won’t let go of it, even after sketching a thumbnail. So much for getting anything done today. 🐿️
Giving Arq Backup a try for my laptop using Amazon S3 for storage thanks to both @vincent and @manton. The hardest part was setting up the bucket on Amazon and provisioning access. Creating the backup plan in Arq was drop-dead simple. I may stick with this as a long-term solution if it works out well.
By the time our hot water adventure is over tomorrow (oh I hope), it will be eight days and $1300 dollars 🪟💸, with that cost going to bring the new hot water heater up to code and the cost of a motel room so my household could take showers. Thankfully my home warranty covers the new hardware cost.
Sunday, November 26, 2023
I’m excited to share I’ve released a new version of my Tinylytics for Micro.blog plugin, bringing it to version 3.1.0. You should see an update in your site’s plugins section soon if not already.
I’m giving Obsidian a spin for notes again. I looked at it briefly once before. I’ve only scratched the surface, but I get the hype. I think what turned me off last time was syncing, but I wasn’t aware it could sync via iCloud. That’s enough for me. Anyone have good pointers?
Wednesday, November 22, 2023 →
Well, the hot water heater saga looks grim. Home warranty company has to approve repair next steps. They and repair company won’t be open until next Monday. The soonest a repair looks plausible is Tuesday. Maybe even Wednesday. This is going to be a very long and somewhat smelly weekend.
Wednesday, November 22, 2023 →
There’s nothing quite like waking up to the hot water heater being on the fritz the day before a major US holiday. If there’s one thing high on my list of “Oh, hell no” items, it has to be taking a cold shower. 🥶
Tuesday, November 21, 2023
I’ve always preferred to support indie developers, so will usually go that route if their app is as good or better than the Apple default.
My transition to the “dark side” is complete. I tried switching to light mode on my workstation and it damn near blinded me… Does that make me one of the cool kids now?
There’s an 80’s music festival going on downtown this weekend. Whoever’s onstage right now is really getting the crowd going. Every five minutes there’s a loud roar. It’s pretty awesome to hear. Kind of wish we had gotten tickets.
Put in some good work on Tinylytics for Micro.blog this afternoon. A couple of cool new features are coming: The ability to link to your public stats if you’ve enabled them and the option to show a web ring avatar for other sites who’ve enabled that in their Tinylytics settings. Check out the footer of this page to see them in action. I’ll let things bake in for a few days while I update documentation.
I killed off my WordPress site over at jimmitchellmedia.net today, setting up a domain forward to my main jimmitchell.org domain. It’s time to consolidate my online persona into one bucket and make Micro.blog my web house.
I’m glad we canceled our weekend plans. A serious bug in the deployment from earlier this week was found late yesterday and I’m spending my PTO day working with the team to resolve it. The good news is it looks like we’ve found the fix. Some of the day might be salvageable. 🤞🏻
I was about to put a note in my (soon to come) Microcasts topics folder about a thing that just happened, but it turns out I already added it as episode #003. Maybe I should bump it up to episode #002… But then the topic for that episode is one that chaps my hide too.
Wednesday, November 15, 2023 →
How is it I’ve never heard about this until now?
Since 2015, several data centers have been submerged underwater in both the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Ocean. The first underwater data center was deployed by Microsoft into the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of California, through an experiment called Project Natick, with Phase 1 being a vessel carrying 1 rack, containing 24 servers.