Qubyte Codes

Weeknotes #3

Published

This week started off a little boring. On the Thursday though, the rebooted Brighton Homebrew Website Club met at Clearleft. After catching up with the folk there, I worked on an experiment to theme this blog, with the theme determined by a toggle in localStorage. By placing an inline script in the head right after the stylesheet link tag, I demonstrated that it's possible to select a theme before a paint, avoiding an awkward flash of the wrong theme. This may not news to anyone but me. I've not implemented anything just yet.

On the topic of themes, I wanted to do this because I want to add a dark theme. To celebrate it (when it’s finished), I will make a dark mode Battenberg cake. At the moment the plan is to make it out of chocolate and red velvet cakes for the pattern, and cover it in chocolate for the outside. I've baked a red velvet cake in a tray, but it came out as a regular chocolate cake so I'm going to use more red colouring for the next try. I'll post a picture if I ever actually make it.

I've noticed folks I know are starting up, or returning to, their personal sites. Just like this blog, the majority of them are being reborn as static sites deployed by Netlify. It's good to know that this solution appeals to more folk than just me. It's even better to see more unique stuff on the web, away from the silos owned by giants like Facebook.

On Sunday evening I enhanced my new blog post tweet bot to include tags. Each post in this blog includes tags, and each of these is a link to a tag page with a rel="tag" attribute. I updated the bot to download the new entry and select rel="tag" elements for their text content. The selected text is then appended to the tweet as hash-tags.

On the home life side of things, the little one had his third set of vaccinations on Friday. A cold delayed the vaccines from the week before (which he weathered far better than my partner and I). The third set of vaccines like the first set. They're painful, and can lead to a fever. We've spent most of this weekend trying to keep him comfortable, the fever low, and the injection sites as pain free as possible. He's almost back to his usual cheerful self now. It should go without saying that these vaccinations are well worth a short period of discomfort.