At the start of lockdown, I organised the footage of me juggling around the world and set up an editing and publishing workflow. The plan was to share a new clip every day on Instagram and Twitter, in chronological order, each from the first visit to a new country/territory since the start of the International Juggler project began.
Yesterday, 127 countries later, I finally caught up to the last new country I visited, which was Antigua last November.
So to mark the end of the marathon daily sharing program, we did a live stream showing all the clips on YouTube, while telling stories and answering questions from the chat.
Itās an hour and forty minutes long, so I donāt suggest you watch it unless really interested in juggling and videography. I just wanted to share a YEAR OF COMPLETING PROJECT COMPLETED ACHIEVEMENT in the forum.
2020 Luke REACTS to 2010 Lukeās song about 2020 Luke!!!
In 2010 I wrote a song called āFuture Lukeā, about what my life was like in 2010, and how it might be different in 10 years. Itās now 2020, so itās time to check in!
Itās my science fiction horror comedy musical: Starship Terra Nova! Itāll never be performed on stage, so instead itās going to be a movie. Or an animation. Or a video game? Who knows!
For now Iām releasing demo versions of the songs with accompanying videos. The plan is to release them regularlyā¦ maybe one every few weeks, depending on the complexity of the video.
In this first scene, Austin Wells shares news of the first interstellar colony ship, powered by the Dark Matter Conveyor Drive, and puts out a call for volunteers.
Back in 2012, one of my favourite podcasts, Hypercritical, ended after 100 episodes. Since then Iāve sporadically worked on a project where I edited all 100 episodes of content into a new set of episodes, based on topic. The main discussions are plucked out of the original episodes, with any followup or commentary added at the end.
Itās been a fun 9 years of work, and I finally got it finished!
In the final episode of Hypercritical, John Siracusa complained that the main problem with the show was that āFollowupā interrupted the beginning of the shows, and delayed the start of each main topic. Followup being spread over many shows also meant there was no easy way to get all of Johnās thoughts on a specific topic without skimming through multiple episodes.
I knew that, as Hypercritical was one of my favourite podcasts, Iād probably listen to it again in the future, maybe multiple times. Future Luke would be happy if I logged when each topic began, and if I logged the followup too, so I did so during my first relisten in 2013. For my second complete relisten, in 2015, I began editing the audio files into topic-based episodes, which took until 2017. For my third relisten, my fourth time through Hypercritical, in 2020, I added introductions to each clip so they had more context. In 2021, after addressing all remaining editing notes, I could finally listen to my favourite topics at any time by making this page and rss feed.
Finally merged my humongous branch to the new GeekNights web site. Itās the biggest and most important chunk really. All the custom functionality for posting new episodes and then automating all the things that happen after that such as ID3 tags, FTP uploads, etc. There is still some more to do there, like automated posting to other platforms like this forum, social media, Discord, etc. But those can be done one at a time.
The next large thing I have to build is the ETL which will transfer all the data from the old site to the new site.
Once that is done there are many things left to do, but they are individually small. No huge chunks that take forever. More like things that take one coding session each.
And I donāt even have to do all of them. As soon as we have achieved feature parity with the current web site, we can switch over. Then just keep iterating on the new site.
When taking breaks from working on the GeekNights web site Iāve been working on creating an all new web presence/brand/identity for myself as an Internet person. You know, for that IndieWeb POSSE model we talked about.
I actually did more than zero research. I studied babyās first typography. I also spent a lot of time looking at cool stationery and vintage computer books and magazines for inspiration. I also learned a lot of new (to me) CSS stuff like flexbox. As an aside, if you want to learn it, this interactive guide to flexbox is the best.
This kind of layout design isnāt possible to critique without the real data. I donāt care about the typography if I donāt know what the subject is. Comic typefaces are fine for light subjects, but probably not for obituaries. Pictures of cats are good placeholders for a pet sitting service website, but what kind of images are going to go there on your website? Code samples? Pictures of your face?
Content and information importance dictates design, otherwise all I can say is ālooks okay for a templateā.
I am going to use this same template for any and all conceivable text-based web content. Iām not going to change up the style and template completely from page to page because one of them has a long rant, another has a tutorial, and another has an embedded video with a brief description below it. Photo gallery is the one where I have to think about it, but even then I think I can make it work.
Are you planning to hamburger menu the header on mobile? I like websites without that, but the current header does take up ~half of the area above the fold on my phone.
