Firehose

Lost my pet chicken of 8 years today. She was with me from primary school all the way through high school and beyond.

She hasn’t been well these past few days. Today when I came out to see her, she really wasn’t well but was still hanging on. I think she was waiting for me to see her before she went.

I picked her up and cradled her for a while before she passed in my arms. There is a bit of comfort knowing I was with her in her last moments and that she wasn’t alone.

I’ll miss you Garbin. Love you.

I might have neglected to re-add the analytics script to the head of my website. That’s a few days of data I won’t be getting back…

People have been trying to go to /now, /about, and /links on my site. I don’t have these pages nor links to them anywhere. Wonder if it’s time to make some…

ARIA sure you need those roles and attributes?

You oft hear of regurgitation, but not much about standard gurgitation.

Got around to sorting out my syndication feeds. Go subscribe!

• https://vale.rocks/posts/feed.xml
• https://vale.rocks/posts/feed.json

Been upgrading and building on this. Pretty happy with it now. It has tons more engines added, a nicer UI (still simple—speed is the priority), and snaps inspired by Kagi which are lovely.

https://vale.rocks/micros/20240721-1249

Pretty convinced jackiechan.com is peak web design.

This has had me thinking about website layouts, and how typically we’ve had navigation situated at the top. Perhaps we need to rethink our designs based on the embrace of sidebars as they become the ‘new normal’?

https://vale.rocks/micros/20241030-0844

A wise man once said “Ogres are like onions. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers.”

Make your CSS like ogres and onions.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “heritage listed websites”. We have buildings that we feel are too important to alter and must keep frozen in time – why not websites?.

I suppose this is less important with the web, as we can ‘simply’ archive copies of things but it’s been playing in my mind nonetheless.

Really interesting seeing what posts get picked up on Fedi, and what posts get picked up on Bluesky. I’m struggling to identify any real pattern.

Part of my diploma at North Metropolitan TAFE was a live-works project redeveloping the website for Public Libraries WA.

My team and I took what was an outdated Joomla site and revitalised it into a sleek, modern experience. The old site was built back in 2009, had security flaws and lacked responsive design, rendering it nigh unusable on mobile devices.

We rebuilt it from the ground up using WordPress paired with a custom theme built using Tailwind and a tailor-made plugin to perfectly fit our client’s needs.

It was awesome working with Emily Drage, Zoe Chan, and Maria Benic on this.