GG, I logged on to the Microsoft MVP Award site only to immediately have digital paperwork thrust at me — to finalize my renewal for a 3rd year as a Microsoft MVP!
This comes on the same day as a new update to Emergency Chat for Windows, the last one for Windows Phone 8.1 devices. So both an exciting and poignant day, but also funny because Emergency Chat is a native C#/XAML app for WinRT/UWP, not a web app, while at the same time I’m a Front End Web Dev/Microsoft Edge MVP and not a Windows Development/Windows Phone MVP.
But I digress. I don’t have much else to say, other than that I’m really going to have to make this 3rd year count if I’m gunning for that 4th year. You see, thanks to my chaotic physical and mental health I really haven’t been as active as I would have liked.1 I haven’t even been able to get stuff done with the LEGO Room, whose reopening it will very soon be a year since, much less web stuff.
In any case, I will continue to take each day as it comes, and hopefully I’ll be back on track with some new content after the next couple of months. Hopefully enough to keep filling my MVP profile — at no point do I intend for it to lie dormant.
My two new WD My Passport drives, an orange 2 TB drive and a black 1 TB drive; as well as complimentary carrying cases in black and blue.
Today, March 31, is the annual World Backup Day. I’ve never written about it before, but my newest (and thus most current) backup drive kicked the bucket in January this year, leaving me out of a current backup solution for both my Mac and PC as well as resulting in a significant but non-critical loss of data. So I decided for the occasion that I’d use the opportunity to write about my experience with a new, upgraded backup solution, as well as measures I’ll be taking to prevent or at least mitigate another data loss like the last.
Earlier this month, my dad picked up some brand new hardware for me: not one, but twoWD My Passport USB 3.0 portable hard drives, an orange 2 TB drive and a black 1 TB drive. The smaller capacity of the latter is due to budget constraints, but the idea is that the orange one will be my primary backup drive and the black one will be used for redundancy. The black and blue carrying cases you see were gifts with purchase!
In this entry I’ll describe my newest backup strategy and how it improves on the last, as well as provide some unboxing and in-action photos of my new WD My Passport drives.
A couple of weeks ago, the CSS Working Group published the first Editor’s Draft of the CSS Nesting Module. And there was much rejoicing, for it was a long overdue addition to the CSS standard. Yes, it’s an Editor’s Draft, meaning it — and by extension everything I discuss in this article — is subject to major changes through its development, but the fact that it’s a W3C draft at all is in itself worth celebrating to many.
As I mentioned in my last entry, I’ve been in a very rough place over the last couple of weeks (actually close to a month now), but I’m happy to report that I’m doing much better this week so I finally had a bit of time to peruse the new spec. In doing so, I thought I’d try my hand at providing an overview of its features along with sharing my personal thoughts on what I see.
No stylesheet preprocessor experience required — this is written from the perspective of someone who has never, ever used one in 13 years of writing CSS (outside of answering questions on Stack Overflow, so I know at the very least a thing or two about them).
This might be a very unusual post given that the blog has thus far remained on a “post something substantial once in a blue moon” basis since the last time I discussed that, but I’ve been in a very rough place over the last couple of weeks and I believe this will make things momentarily interesting. If you’re familiar with the concept of asides in blogs, you’ll understand this post’s existence right away.
This post is inspired by a series of posts my friend Georgie recently started. You can learn more on her blog. We’ve been exchanging tiny wins privately for some time so this is not unfamiliar territory to me, I just never posted about it before now.
So, today’s tiny win: shipped an update to this blog’s WordPress theme that does nothing except remove the calls to body_class() and post_class().
The rationale is simple: no point keeping dozens of class names in markup you know you will never use. The vast majority of custom themes and themes made widely available will of course use them one way or another, but mine won’t.
Sure, I may not be saving kilobytes of bandwidth per page load, but it’s still something, and bandwidth does add up pretty quickly no matter the scale. And for the author of the markup — the human — it means less polluted and therefore more readable markup. Maybe you don’t care about that sort of thing (it sure seems that way for most authors these days), but I do.
