19 June

In praise of link rot

Thanks to my On This Day plugin (not the plugin I was asking ChatGPT for help with in my last post), it’s really easy to “surface” (I hate that as a transitive verb) some really old posts here on my blog, which has now existed for about 24 years… frighteningly close to half of my life.

I clicked on the link to a post I wrote on this day in 2008. It was about links to articles I didn’t want to lose track of.

And it’s interesting for a couple of reasons. First, there was — was — an image at the top of the page. What it was, I have no idea. But that, like all of the other images on the blog before about a year ago, are now gone. I deleted them, because I was tired of getting harassed into paying hundreds of dollars out of the blue for random images that were lurking, unseen by anyone, on ancient blog posts no one reads.

I’ve usually been pretty good about only posting images I created, but when you’ve been at this for two decades, there are going to be a few times when you get lax. And there are a couple of news agencies who have contracted with a company that is absolutely ruthless about shaking down unsuspecting bloggers. What a racket.

But I digress… I wanted to talk about the links on that page.

They’re both dead, too, but they still go somewhere. The domains they linked to are still active, but now they redirect to 404 pages on completely different domains. Whoever owned those domains either sold them or let them lapse, and now they’re something completely different.

A lot of people want to fight “link rot.” But not me. I relish it. The Internet is an Orwellian memory hole, and fixing broken links in blog posts from 2008 just accelerates that. The pages I’m linking to have long since disappeared. But their URLs remain in a zombie state here on my blog as a testament to the fact that these things once existed.

Like the website Veer.com. I don’t even remember exactly what it was, and it had been years since I had last contemplated its existence, but once I saw that link, my immediate reaction was, “Oh yeah, I remember that site. Well… no, actually I don’t, but I remember that was a site, and I used to like checking it out semi-regularly.”

There are so many lost worlds like this. No longer present anywhere on the Internet*, but lingering in the dusty backrooms of Gen Xers’ minds.

*I lied, of course. The Wayback Machine exists. I managed to find a snapshot of that URL from June 10, 2008, about a week before I posted about it.

It even still has the image of the coffee mug I was interested in! But I’m not going to post it here. I know better. Finally.

I actually used ChatGPT to solve a coding problem today

The following originally appeared as a post on my YouTube channel.

Trigger warning: not entirely negative stuff about A.I.

I have the script written for the first half of my “5-String Bass Showdown” video (the second half will be unscripted), but I may not get around to making that video this weekend, because one half of my “day job” (indie WordPress plugin developer) is bleeding over into my video time.

I spent about 10 hours sitting in front of my computer today. The first half of that was beating my head against the wall over an extremely obscure problem I was having with Block Editor development. (I am an old school PHP developer and I have never bothered to learn React, so I keep the dev side of the Block Editor at arm’s length.)

Anyway… after literally 5 hours of almost no progress, beyond homing in on exactly where, but not what, the problem was, and getting nowhere reading 6-year-old GitHub discussion threads and even older StackOverflow threads, I finally resorted to…

Asking ChatGPT. (With DuckDuckGo’s Duck.ai as an intermediary, of course.)

Luckily I had gotten to the point where I could succinctly state in one sentence exactly where I was stuck, and provide ChatGPT with the relevant JavaScript function from my code.

In less than 5 seconds, it returned a cogent explanation of why my code was having an issue, along with a minimally rewritten version of my function that solved the problem.

It even mimicked my somewhat idiosyncratic coding style.

As Dr. Gnome would say, “Uff da.”

After finally taking a break around 3 PM to eat lunch and ponder my existential crisis, I decided to throw a few of my other “back burner” issues at it. The first one, which I thought would be the simplest, ended up being unresolvable. Two others were simple code refactoring (JavaScript is not my strongest suit), and it knocked those out of the park.

So… I’ve come to realize, A.I. like ChatGPT does have a role in my work. It can be a good partner to troubleshoot and optimize the code I write in languages I don’t know like the back of my hand.

But to that end, I think of it in a very similar way to how I’m using the stem splitter in Logic. It’s a tool to streamline the things I already do, and fill in the gaps. But ultimately I still have to be the one doing the thinking.

Yes, it’s… yet another redesign

I’ve redesigned this blog more times than I can count. Many of those redesigns have been incremental tweaks, to be sure, but still, there’ve been probably dozens of times that I’ve completely torn it down and rebuilt it, more-or-less from scratch. This is one of those times.

I’ve also (finally) wised up a bit. Usually when I post these redesign announcements, I don’t include a screenshot… as if this is the last time I’ll ever redesign the site. I wish I could go back to some of those earlier posts and see what the site actually looked like when I announced the changes. I can remember most of them, even from the pointless ramblings I composed to commemorate their creation. But it would still be nice to see them on the outside of my brain.

There are some big changes in this version. Most significantly, I’m using two (relatively) new technologies as both key components of the underlying structure and also as inspiration for the design itself. They’re created (or at least inspired) by some amazingly talented people in this field, so they deserve recognition.

First, the fonts are being delivered by Typekit. Finally, web designers have more fonts at their disposal than Arial, Georgia and Verdana. (Yes, there are some others, but these three are the most excessively used.) There are some awesome people behind Typekit, but I especially want to call out founder Jeffrey Veen and creative director (and probably the best web designer on the planet) Jason Santa Maria.

Next up, we have a responsive web design using CSS3 media queries. (Yes, that’s probably the most boring possible link about one of the coolest technologies out there right now in web design.) I think we have Ethan Marcotte to thank for devising this brilliant use of CSS3 media queries to dynamically adapt web page layouts to the size of the browser window. At the very least, he named it and helped spread the word with the aforelinked A List Apart article and his new book.

In short, by employing CSS3 media queries to adjust the page layout to an appropriate width and number of columns (and smartly resizing elements within), it’s possible to easily adapt a web page’s presentation to suit the capabilities and dimensions of a number of screens. Just take a look at this site on your 27-inch iMac and then on your iPhone (or your roughly equivalent non-Apple devices) to see what I mean. I’m sure I’m not doing Ethan’s work justice, either in my description or in my application of it here, but I’m excited about the potential regardless.

It’s a great time to be a web designer!

Update: I went for less than 48 hours with Futura PT Light as my primary font for body text here, despite knowing it was too light and, perhaps, too geometric for good body type. Finally, at a friend’s prodding, I resorted to the inevitable: Proxima Nova. I love Proxima Nova. It’s the primary font I use in all of my business materials (and in my logo itself). I had envisioned a kind of ’50s retro school textbook concept with this site redesign, and Proxima Nova, a 21st century font, doesn’t fit that description, but… man, it just looks so good. So, now it’s here.

The only thing worse than Arial is a careless mix of Arial and Helvetica

I snapped these photos yesterday in the parking lot of the Lyndale Rose Garden in Minneapolis. Why, at a garden with huge displays of flowers, fountains, sculptures and more, would I bother taking not just one but multiple photos of the pay machine in a parking lot?

Fonts.

In particular, ever since I saw the documentary Helvetica, I’ve been observing instances of the use of Arial — that abomination of a Helvetica knockoff Microsoft foisted upon the world by being too cheap to license Helvetica for Windows — on public signage. In days gone by, the default, almost ubiquitous, font on all sorts of public signs was Helvetica. But in the modern PC era, these signs often use Arial, the readily available not-quite-lookalike, instead.

But this pay machine is something else entirely. It displays a schizophrenic mix of Arial and Helvetica.



'PAY HERE' and taped-on sign in Arial
The most readily distinguishable difference between Arial and Helvetica, as I’ve noted before, is the capital R. So this pay machine immediately caught my attention with the giant “PAY HERE” sign at its top, immediately recognizable as Arial. I also noticed that the taped-on “ATTENTION” sign (which frustratingly informed me that the credit card function was not working) was in Arial as well.



Dymo labels in Helvetica
Next I noticed the pasted-on Dymo labels below the change slot, which were printed in Helvetica.



Machine instructions in Helvetica
The instructions printed on the machine, presumably by the manufacturer, are in Helvetica, albeit an ugly, artificially compressed version. So it would appear that the “PAY HERE” sign was a Minneapolis add-on and not part of the original unit.


Some handy articles and links I don’t want to lose…

Harken back to the days of yore, when we all kept our NCSA Mosaic “hotlists” up to date with our latest favorite links. Come to think of it, a blogroll (a term that is quickly becoming just as antiquated) is no different. But since I generally keep my sidebar link lists (a.k.a. the “blogroll”) limited to top-level pages of sites in which I have a broad interest, but these items are specific sub-pages or blog posts, I am just going to list them out here for my own future reference, and yours.

First up we have a cool coffee mug for type aficionados, and it even ties in with the excellent Helvetica documentary.

Next, some Useful WordPress Tricks… the title says it all.

And then we have… well, actually that’s all we have for right now, but if I think of, or stumble upon, anything else pertinent and/or interesting before the stroke of midnight, I’ll just add it here.