Dear friend,
I haven’t added many posts to this blog recently, it’s true. But I have done a number of changes here and there. First, and most surprising, I have been writing mostly in English. Surprising, because my prose is definitely more spontaneous in my mother tongue than in my second language. On the other hand, since the end of last year, I have started journaling daily, and that happens almost exclusively in English. I’m not sure whether this choice will stick, but that’s the mood I am in now. So I am changing the default language of the website to ‘En’ for now.
The rest of the changes are less drastic, but I would like to list them here anyway, in part to keep track of them, and in part to give credit to the people online that have helped me implement them (without knowing):
- the smallest change of all, but still a small victory considering how confusing Css still is for me, the background of the home page is now in line with the background of the post pages (i.e., white for light mode, rather than gray);
- the most complex change - and I’m not sure I have solved this yet, I suspect that NetNewsWire doesn’t support this at all - has been to add the cover image of each post to the RSS feed. This was surprisingly tough, and luckily I wasn’t the only person trying to solve it. I ended up adapting the solution proposed by Yihan Wu , with some added complication due to the structure of a multilingual blog. It’s also worth mentioning Justin Garrison , who proposes a different solution;
- I’ve managed to find the time to play a bit with Hugo’s data features, so I have created a gallery of the films that I have rated the highest (four stars or more) on Letterboxd (plus a text-only version ). This task required, on one side, a bit of work to understand how to put in place the grid structure for the poster. On the other, the acquisition of export data from Letterboxd (for older ratings) into json, and a Python script to update with the latest ratings. I think it’s fair to mention Mark Llobrera and Robb Knight as inspirations for the whole exercise;
- I have added a footer for each post linking to my email address, in case anyone would like to write a line or two as feedback.
Finally, a non-technical change but a change nonetheless: I have realised that, for me, self-consciousness is the main adversary when I write. To fight it, I found immensely helpful to imagine I’m writing to a friend instead of an audience of unknown readers. The ‘dear friend’ opening I have used in these latest posts helps me get in the right state of mind for writing.
p.s. After I started writing this post, I found JamesG’s post The joy of incremental website improvement , which summarises perfectly the reason for spending a little bit of spare time, day by day, to make a web space that feels like home and a playground