It’s Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, so I’m out at Squam, eating delicious food and spending time with family. When I was living on the west coast that wasn’t really in the cards, so we’d host our own, which was a delight, but it’s nice to do the big family one again.
Styling RSS
I’ve mentioned before, I use Vienna as my RSS reader. I like it generally, but I wasn’t satisfied with the existing styles that were available, so starting with the FeedLight Graphite style, I made some modifications:
- Font size is a bit larger and more readable,
- I adjusted the header sizes,
- I adjusted the font to use Apple’s text fonts (SF Pro Text, SF Mono, SF UI Text, New York),
- I made the header sticky so you can still see what post you’re on when reading a long post,
- I added a light border and background adjustment for code blocks.
The process was a lot simpler than I’d expected – I kind of wish I’d gotten around to it sooner. You can download it if you’d like to try it out:
Thinking about writing
I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking about my relationship with my blog and my writing and how I might be able to organize things in different ways to help it all come together more cohesively. Still a long way to go on that, but just to get started, I exported my entire blog, converted it to markdown, and imported it into Obsidian. Their graph feature was interesting, because it let me visually see what sort of clusters my writing was tending to fall into (based on what tags I was putting on the posts, so it’s not a perfect map, but it’s a good sketch). You could even get an animated view based on post dates to see when different tags were surfacing – for instance, I have 34 posts tagged with Music, but the last time I added anything to it was 2018, and most of the posts are from 2007. (The two of the three tags with the most posts are Critique and Annotations, neither of which I’ve used since 2007. The other is Social Computing, and is very active in recent years.)
Still noodling on things, and also starting to review what tags I have, what should get consolidated, and so on. And then I’ll just need to figure out what I want to do with it. 
Other writing stuff
I’m still thinking about that static site generator stuff, and that markdown conversion I did will be useful for experimentation on that front as well. That said, I don’t have much to show quite yet, and it probably won’t go on this site when I do have something to share, at least at first. I’ve got a handful of unused domains at the moment, so I’ll probably do any experiments on one of those.
On the topic of other blogs/sites, what do y’all think? Right now this blog is sort of a catch-all for whatever I want to share or talk about at the time. Does this bother you? Would it be useful if I, say, funneled off some of the nerdier topics (coding, social computing stuff, etc) to a separate blog? I’m not really trying to be a “thought-leader” or build an audience or anything, so I’ve not really cared if the blog ends up being a hodgepodge mix of life updates and thoughts about technology and industry, but maybe others would appreciate more of a division. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If I’m going through the effort of cleaning and re-organizing, now’s a good time to ask that question.
Life
Meet Miss Mabel
Mabel is the newest addition to the family. She’s about 10 months old, and we’re not entirely sure what breeds she is – pretty sure some type of retriever, not sure what else. Regardless, she’s very sweet (and a little mischievous when she’s not napping the day away). Cecil has been a great big brother so far, helping her get comfortable, and they’ve become fast friends.
Mile a Minute
As I mentioned last post, life’s been pretty hectic lately. I’d actually like to write a bit about the project I’ve been working on at work, but I need to collect my thoughts a bit and then run it by my boss first to make sure I’m not talking about stuff we’d prefer to keep internal.
It’s definitely felt like a whole chain of activity for a while now, and not a lot of opportunities to catch my breath. Even when I’ve had down time, I’ve still ended up feeling pressed for time – both mentally getting stuck on the things still needing to be done, and physically with trying to catch up on all the little life things I hadn’t been able to get to during the work week. I’m looking forward to things getting back to a more normal routine – stop letting work be so consuming, start resetting boundaries and expectations for availability. (I don’t mind brief periods where I’m more “always on”, but that’s not the lifestyle I want generally.)
I’ve felt the edges of some depression creeping up around me, but I’ve mostly been too busy to dwell on it. I really want a break, but I’m also a little worried that the funk will catch up with me. I think the best path forward right now is to try and slow down and divert myself with some personal projects, but not let myself actually pause.
Life is good, actually
I’m griping about being exhausted and not having a minute and working too much, but really, life is pretty good. I’ve got a loving partner, we have a house, we have two sweet dogs. I’m fairly healthy. I largely like my work, I get lots of opportunities to learn to do new things, and I’m paid enough that we’re not constantly stressed about money. We just got done doing a year long wander around the country, and already have some more travel planned in the near future. Things could be a lot worse (note: this is not an invitation for life to get worse).
I still worry about stuff, of course, but I worry about friends and family more than myself. I want the people I care about to succeed and be happy. It worries me when I see folks struggling, especially when I’m not in a position to help. I hope things get better for everyone – even if things end up a bit too heavy, we’ll all float on alright.
Happy Thanksgiving to the Canadians, happy Indigenous People’s Day to the Americans, and happy October to everyone.