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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Thu, 14 Dec 2017

How to make your HTML responsive by adding a single line of CSS | freeCodeCamp

How to make your HTML responsive by adding a single line of CSS

How to leave white space on both sides of the page in an HTML document

From Stack Overflow: How to leave white space on both sides of the page in HTML

Fri, 05 Jun 2015

I love the design of wit.io

I stumbled across the wit.io blog. The layout is nice, but it's the typography I love.

Here's an entry: Clojure: All grown up

The font, the sizes, the colors of the type and the background. I like it.

Font color is #666

The background color is #e9e9e9

From the CSS:

font-family: "Gentium Book Basic",Vollkorn,Baskerville,"Hoefler Text";

The Vollkorn font is drawn in from Google:

@import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Vollkorn:400italic,400,700&subset=latin);

Nice!

Thu, 05 Dec 2013

Code blocks in Markdown: just tab

I was making things hard on myself. I was trying to do a big code block on this blog in Markdown with backticks all over the place.

But the way it works in Markdown, you just tab or indent four spaces, and it's all wrapped in <pre> and <code> with all the tags rewritten so they'll show up the right way on your live site.

Backticks like `this` (which renders like this on this site) are still good for shorter code blocks on a single line.

But for longer code blocks, it's better to tab 'em.

Thu, 08 Nov 2012

The Marketplace radio program has a very nice Drupal web site

I wanted to find a particularly galling story I heard on American Public Media's Marketplace business radio program and was pleased to find a very good-looking and functional web site that just happens to be built on Drupal.

I still like the simplicity of the stories page better than the home page. Marketplace is all about the stories that appear on the air, and quick, simple, "here they are" access is what I want to see (and do).

The beginning of the stories page is on top of this entry. Here's more of the stories page so you can see how each item appears in the rundown. I really like the simplicity and uniformity (click on either image for a full-sized view):

So what was the particularly galling story about? Well, this small-business owner couldn't decide whether to vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama, and on her second appearance on Marketplace she wouldn't reveal her vote. What she did want from President Obama in a second term was "compromise" on his pledge to keep taxes the same for those making ,000 and below. She thought he should bend a little and pledge not to raise taxes for those making ,000 and below. Her strong implication was that a family dragging in HALF A MILLION DOLLARS A YEAR is still "middle class."

Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal replied, "But that makes you part of the 1 percent ..." He didn't pursue it further. I can't blame him.

But I will spell it out. I don't think ,000/year makes you part of the middle class. If anything, you're "upper middle class." However, if you make ,000 a year, YOU ARE RICH. You are fucking rich, so shut the fuck up.