This morning as I was going through my blogroll waiting for my double-height cup of coffee to kick in, I came across Cole’s post about the obvious rewards, or lack thereof, of blogging (or any content creation, really), and it resonated with me. Why DO people like me have websites that we update and maintain and post links to when it genuinely seems like maybe one or two people at most ever notice?
The good thing is that we can do our art because we love it. It really doesn’t matter how great (or small) the response is. As Robert notes, “I’m doing this because I love it. If others like it too, great, but that’s not the main purpose.”
That’s it exactly. It’s not about public notoriety or the dopamine hit of notifications and increasing follower counts. I don’t care at all about those things. I care about doing things I find interesting, and if someone ever finds one of my posts useful, that will be wonderful! That’s what I want! But it’s not what I need in order to keep doing it.
If you’re going to make a business or a large part of your income from your online work, you need eyeballs, and you need “engagement” (I really don’t like that word). But when I see some of my friends obsessing about their follower counts and using the word engagement non-ironically, I just think that I never want to have to live that way. 😄 I’m one of those dumb enthusiasts who doesn’t track anything, has almost no followers, and loves the fact that it’s never going to be about numbers.
But what about you? What are you doing with your website to make it uniquely yours? I like to link to people’s stuff on my links page, whether it be in my Blogroll section or my Cool Site Spotlight. The best of the web is people doing things because they love it, and linking to each other. Let me know on Mastodon what I’m missing!
You may have noticed that today marks a redesign that I hope brings a cleaner, sleeker, easier to read format to the site. I’m kind of excited about it – I hope it’s at least tolerable for you, the reader! Even better, I hope you actually like it.
This site has had a lot of redesigns over the years. The worst were during the Wordpress years. The site started getting good1 during the Hugo and Eleventy years, and my satisfaction with it has only increased in the current Astro incarnation.2
I certainly like this version better than yesterday’s site, which had a too-large site title and darker backgrounds for post content. I used this design to give posts delineation in the index page list view, but it really just made things feel cramped and busy.
For reference, here’s what it looked like on June 21, 2024.
And here’s the redesign I launched today, June 22, 2024.
And the same in light theme:
An obvious difference is I’ve reverted back to a horizontal header navigation menu instead of the sticky vertical side menu. Also I’ve reverted to having icons only, without text, in the navigation menu. And finally, they’re colored icons! I had colors in my menu icons back in 2021, and I kind of missed it.
Here’s what part of a blog post page looked like yesterday, followed by an image of what that same blog post page looks like today.
As much as side menus are nice, I do like the centered, slightly wider blog post view that the header menu approach affords.
And just for fun, here’s a shot from 2020, showing what things looked like then. Not long after this, I added color to the menu icons, but I haven’t found a screenshot of that yet. I’m pretty sure I have one somewhere.
I still have some tweaks and fixes to make, but nothing too breaking. I hope you enjoy the new look!
Footnotes
“Good” is a relative term because I am, after all, the one designing my web site. I have some design skill limitations to be sure. ↩
Slight aside: Astro is by far the “best” (by my definition of the word) site framework I’ve used to date. It allows for static (pre-rendered) or SSR (on-demand rendered) modes, eschews templating languages like Mustache and Handlebars, and is incredibly flexible. ↩
Threads generally makes me sad by being social media, so I don’t look at it often. Imagine my surprise today when I was wading through some hostile replies to my thoughts about an F1 related topic and I stumbled across a comment to me about my post on Using Git Hooks for Displaying Last Modified Dates and how to apply it to Astro Sitemap.
Interesting question. I guess the approach would be to first use pre-commit to modify the timestamps on any pages updated in the commit and then modify the sitemap file by looking for any pages with date modified timestamps and updating their entries in the sitemap.
There is a serialize function in Astro Sitemap and it looks like it happens on build when writing out the sitemap. If this is true, so long as you do your git commit before you do your build, it should update the pages with the correct last modified dates.
Now I’m going to have to play with Astro Sitemap and find out!
I wrote about OCR in CleanShot X in my last post, and my friend David Nelson reminded me of another stellar feature of CleanShot X – scrolling screenshots.
It’s true, this is a great feature. It’s a little counterintuitive to get it to work initially, but once you get it, you’ll use this all the time. I have a keyboard shortcut set up to initiate a scrolling screenshot, but you can do it from the CleanShot X menubar icon (or even from Raycast – more on that later). All I have to do is hit ⇧⌥⌘4 to start the scrolling capture using CleanShot X. Then it’s a little odd - it wants you to drag an ouline around the area to be scrolled. Usually this means my full browser window. Then click Start Capture, click Auto-Scroll, click Done when it finishes, and then you have a long screenshot.
Here’s the result.
I originally put a screenshot of my own site’s home page here, but It looks a little funny because I have a site menu that doesn’t disappear up the page as it scrolls, so the menu looks long and repetitive in a way that it isn’t. Page scrollbars have similar issues, but overall, it’s a great feature that’s useful if you have a need to document a long document of any kind.
I love this modern era of computing, and do you know why? Text Recognition, also known as OCR in many apps, is amazing in so many apps and OSes now, and it is very useful.
CleanShot X does Text Recognition a little differently than other apps. With CleanShot X, you can use a keyboard shortcut to bring up a capture tool, exactly like a screenshot capture tool, and you drag over the area you want text recognition in. In my case, I have ⌥⇧⌘O set as my keyboard shortcut.
Let’s say I have a screenshot of the title of The Verge’s recent iPad Pro article, for some inexplicable reason.
I can hit ⌥⇧⌘O, drag over the part of the image with the text I want to capture, and release. CleanShot X automatically detects all text in that region and copies it to the clipboard. Then I can (also inexplicably) open TextEdit and paste it in.
I like the simplicity of it and the fact that I get to define the region to look for text in, and the fact that it just copies all text in that region to the clipboard without me having to pick and choose words or lines or paragraphs or whatever.
Here’s a little tip for you Windows users: Snipping Tool has Text Recognition built in too. You can fire it up and capture onscreen notes that people are typing in Teams meetings and use the Text Recognition tool to grab the text for yourself in case the presenter forgets to send out a particular set of notes they’re typing up as they’re talking. It’s great. I do it all the time.
There are lots of Text Recognition examples in macOS and iOS and apps that run on those platforms, and I celebrate them all. We live in a golden age of utility software.
I’ve finally had a chance to play with the ChatGPT macOS app1 and I’m here to say it doesn’t swing the uppercut required to get me to stop paying for Raycast Advanced AI. Right now the one thing it has that Raycast AI does not is the ability to upload files for parsing, but that’s coming soon to Raycast AI. Raycast also keeps playing with ideas like support for local LLMs to augment their Advanced AI plan support for models like OpenAI GPT-4o, Anthropic Claude 3 Sonnet and Opus, and Perplexity Llama 3 Sonar Large.
Add to that things like Raycast AI Commands, which I posted about previously, and Raycast AI is still a very attractive option for integrating AI into workflows where it makes sense to do so. I feel like I have to add that caveat given that a lot of people want to dismiss the whole thing out of hand as some kind of scam. It’s not – but that doesn’t mean LLMs are applied optimally in a lot of cases and it doesn’t mean I trust the companies involved to take time to come up with correct and optimum use cases.2
Slight tangent – I think I view Raycast AI Commands as similar in purpose to things like Fabric and GPTScript, even if different in scope and flexibility, possibly. Definitely more on that as I find time to investigate all of these further.
Mac display settings are weird. I have a 5k Apple Studio Display. Until recently, I’ve been using the default resolution , which is 2560 x 1440. Then I started using the Studio Display for my work laptop as well, which is a Lenovo laptop, and I noticed by default it just uses the full resolution of 5120 x 2880.
After seeing how great all that extra space on the PC was for remoting into servers and controlling large semiconductor test equipment UIs and being able to comfortably see everything without any scrolling, I started wondering why I was running the Mac at 2560 x 1440.
System Settings has a Displays section that, among other things, shows you your resolution as 5 buttons labeled “Larger Text” on the low resolution side of things, through “Default” for 2560 x 1440, up to “More Space” for the (apparently) highest resolution.
The thing is, this isn’t actually the highest resolution. If you click the “Advanced” button on this screen and choose to display resolutions as a list, you see that “More Space” sets the monitor to 3200 x 1800, and that there’s another option for 5120 x 2880.
Here’s my gripe with macOS though – remember that “Larger Text” setting? That’s because Apple’s basic way of noticeably changing text size is changing monitor resolution. Which… is stupid. Screen resolution should be used to change how much you can see on screen at once, not to directly correlate that to text size. Yes, there will be some correlation, but Apple’s kind of making it 1:1 instead of allowing it to be a loose, more flexible relationship.
Yes, you can adjust the font size in finder windows to a degree (but not enough for old eyes at 5120 x 2880) and you can adjust font size in some apps with ⌘+, but other apps either have their own way or don’t let you do it at all, and the desktop and menu bar are non-adjustable as far as I can tell.
Accessibility has a few features for this, and you can VERY slightly increase menu bar font size (but not menu bar icon sizes (?) and I couldn’t find a way to change desktop font size. It’s very weird, and I’m sure an accessibility expert could point out all the things I’m missing, but the point is it’s non-discoverable and there’s no unified way to say “Guys, I’m looking at everything shrunk down because I’m on the highest resolution, just show me proportionally larger text EVERYWHERE. You’re the operating system, make it happen.”
I don’t know what Microsoft is doing, but they apparently realize that letting the text disappear into the distance at 5120 x 2880 is a bad idea, because the text is not that much smaller than it was for me on my previous QHD (2560 x 1440) work monitors. I really didn’t notice much of a difference for a lot of things other than suddenly having tons of viewing space. Certain apps like RDCMan and anything happening on remote machines at those higher resolutions are exceptions, of course.
Anyway, I’d love to know why this is the way it is, what I’m doing wrong (you’re the internet, isn’t it your God given mission to make sure people know they’re wrong?), and how everyone else handles it without just saying “well, I guess I’ll just view everything at 1440 x 810” or some ridiculous thing. Let me know.
