Monthly Recap: April 2024
What’s happening Internet? Was it just me, or did April feel like it came and went like nothing?
It might have felt rushed to me as I was busy wrapping up work and handing over my day-to-day tasks as I prepared to go on parental leave until September! I’m almost through the first week of looking after my daughter full time and am loving it.
I’m changing up the format the recap posts this month, similar to the week notes posts I see shared across the community.
Blogging
I definitely picked up the slack from February and March. I found that sitting down at the end of the day and writing got me there. It’s too easy to just sit down in front of the TV and do nothing. Depending on how long it takes to write any of these, I still have time for an episode or two before bed.
- CSS Naked Day 2024: Brief notes on CSS Naked Day 202
- Blogging Anonymously: Spurred by a post by Kev Quirk and a response by Frills, I really enjoyed diving into why I’m happy to go by fLaMEd online.
- Instant Messaging: I remember how awesome it was chatting with friends with dedicated instant messaging apps.
- Instant Messaging On XMPP: Following up on remembering, I got setup on omglol’s XMPP server and started chatting. Hit me up if you want to chat.
- Deploying An 11ty Project To Shared Hosting: I talked about moving onto shared hosting in last months recap and dived into how I’m building and deploying fLaMEd Fury to it.
- Surfing The Web And Sharing What I Find: Another post that was sitting in draft format for too long. Check out how I populate my bookmarks page.
Reading
I read two books in April. They were both chunky coming in at 16 and 17 hours respectively. I didn’t have much time outside doing stuff that I didn’t get through any more books, that’s just the way it goes some times. I also needed a break after smashing through the entire Three Body Problem in only 9 days…
- A Court of Thorns and Roses: This was a long, but easy read and just what I needed. The main character seemed insufferable at first, like they always do in these stories but overall enjoyed as it progressed.
- The Penguin History of Aotearoa New Zealand: This was a fantastic read. Just a great in depth look at Aotearoa’s history. I recommend for every Kiwi and anyone who’s remotely interested in our small and remote country.
Music
Record Store Day happens two times a year April 20 was the first of 2024. While I didn’t buy any of the RSD releases I picked up a few from my wish list.
- Significant Other: Limp Bizkit get a lot of hate, but this is an absolute banger from my childhood.
- Smash: Smash is my favourite Offspring album. I haven’t opened it to play yet, but interested to see if it sounds as bad on vinyl as they say…
Bookmarks
It looks like I saved around 25 bookmarks in April. A few of the highlights were:
- Seven Little Pieces of My Heart: A nice idea for introducing people to artists or bands you like with only seven songs. I can’t wait to start putting together my own seven song playlists.
- Apple Is Not the Reason I’m Buying Apple Products - These People Are: A sweeet list of mostly indie developped apps for Apple devices.
- The “golden era” of blogging: Hey Georgie remembers her golden era of blogging. I think about this stuff a lot and I really enjoyed reading this one.
- Heat Death of the Internet: Great piece that has you nodding your head in agreement as you read along.
- The Analog Web - The History of the Web: Jay Hoffman dives into the small web, what he describes as the analog web. I even managed to get a quote and link near the bottom 🙌
Website
I feel like I’ve made a lot of behind the scenes changes this month.
- I setup a JSON feed for the Bookmarks to be able to cross post with Echo Feed, (Robb’s sweet new web app). I took the opportunity to tidy up the structure of each of the individual bookmark pages while I was at it.
- Over on the /now page I changed up the Reading section, I might simplify it again and move the details across to the Bookshelf.
- On the Recordshelf I tidied up the record details text, it looks much nicer now 👌
- I updated the search engine section on the links page with a few new search engines I’ve come across recently.
- Site wide I moved the theme switcher from the footer to the top navigation and reduced it to a single button that swaps between light and dark depending on what mode you’re on. Next step is to change to pretty icons.
Around the web
As mentioned above, Robb launched Echo Feed, a fantastic web app for cross-posting stuff from your website across the web. I had the opportunity to beta test it for a short time before the launch and signed up for a premium licence so I could have more than one feed pumping through it. To start with any new post or bookmark is automatically shared to my Mastodon account. Too easy.
The hot topic this month in the small web community is definitely Annie Green’s WeblogPoMo event happening this May. WeblogPoMo is Weblog Posting Month, 2024! If you use weblog.lol, or otherwise have a personal blog, you should absolutely participate in this month-long blog posting extravaganza! I’ve decided I’ll participate by trying to post every day during may about media I’ve watched, listened to, or read. Nice short posts that aren’t reviews. Looking forward to it.
This has definitely taken longer to write than I anticipated so I’m going to wrap this up now so I can watch some TV and work on my first WeblogPoMo before the day ends.
Catch you on the flip side 🤙
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