Weeknotes 23: I Hope I’m Good at This

• Final week of funemployment in the books. What did we learn? There were some good bike rides. The dog is sick of all the attention. Sort of cleaned the garage, but then mostly made it worse again (do not start down the rabbit hole of Akro-Mils bins). Will try to stay employed going forward. Alright, good retro.

• Small improvement corner: Reworked image handling pretty significantly using the handy eleventy-img plugin. Previously, I was just dropping files in a folder. Now we’re outputting both jpeg and webp in a bunch of smaller sizes at build time. There are a ton of bugs to squash and room to optimize the output sizes, but it already feels more considered than just dropping a 24MP image (sorry!) in the middle of a list. A reminder that I need to brush up on the latest & greatest thinking around resolution-independent images and srcsets. Will probably start here; Jake has never steered me wrong.

• Remember NPR First Listen? They’d post entire albums to stream about a month before their release date. This was largely before the subscription music app days and I know it drove a ton of purchases on iTunes for me. I was completely obsessed. I even ran a Twitter bot to grab new posts off the NPR API and announce them back when that was a thing that was allowed. Seems like it died a quiet death at the beginning of the pandemic. RIP.

• It really makes me nostalgic for how much more enjoyable discovering and listening to music used to be, even if it was arguably harder to find and certainly more expensive. What I wouldn’t give to have Rdio again, or even go all the way back to a carefully curated collection on an iPod. I know there are at least a few folks retrofitting old iPods with fresh batteries, giant SSDs, and even Bluetooth. I am deliberately avoiding any more research into how to get one of these because it is catnip formulated exactly for me.

• A friendship thought technology from my wife: always end plans with friends by making your next plans.