Every new year I tell myself “This will be the year I stop eating lunches at my desk”, and every year I’ve ended up failing on the very first day back in the office. This year was no exception. At least I’m consistent in my failings.

📷 Happy New Year from the top of SoCal!

A view of Palm Springs at night from the tramway restaurant on Mt. San Jacinto.

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.

A bowl of homemade chili with cheese, a dollop of sour cream and jalapenos on a holiday placemat. A spoon sits to the left of the bowl.

Yep… I had to get in on it too. My bass-playing Funko Box alter ego.

Jim Mitchell as a bass-playing Funko character

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.

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…

Close up of a carved bear likeness.

📷 Campground peacock.

Peacock roaming our campsite.

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.

Tinylytics for Micro.blog v3.1.0

Tinylytcis post header

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.

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