Sunday Selection 2025-03-09
It's March, but it feels like my year is just starting (for reasons I may dive into at a later date). It feels like I'm in a prolonged spring cleaning session, at least for my digital life. This year I want to more seriously get into digital photography, and I'm starting by moving old photos off of various SD cards into a Lightroom catalog. I'm going through all the emails that have piled up in one of my email accounts, deleting a lot of them, and unsubscribing from all the lists that are no longer relevant to me. I'm also digging through a ton of tabs and bookmarks, reading things that have been waiting for a while, and closing them out. So the next few editions of Sunday Selection will be populated from my massive tab backlog.
A lovely little piece of digital art tracking major events in Gina Trapani's life, a week at a time. Personally I feel like I have a pretty bad memory for things that have happened in my life, and having something like this would be a good way to keep track of things that have kept track of things in my life. This version is based on a similar page by Buster Benson, which links to its source code, if you want to make a version for itself.
Why I Choose Lua for this Blog
Since Version 4 I've been using Lume to build this site, and though it's generally pretty great, I am occassionally concerned about the amount of TypeScript dependencies that I pull in every time Lume is updated. Something like Andre Garzia's homegrown, low-dependency blogging software has a certain appeal to it: knowing in more detail what you're depending, and that it won't change very often. In the distant future, if I ever do get around to building my own website generator, these are concerns that will be top of mind. Relatedly, as a programming language nerd, I find the appealing of a slowly developing, mostly language very appealing. I think that some languages (Java comes to mind) should be frozen once they get to some "good enough" point, rather than continually evolving and sprouting new features.
Continuing on the topic of rolling your own website software, Michael Winston Dales describes his motivation and solution for going from a purely-static Hugo-based site to a slightly more dynamic one. Dales' main motivation is to more efficiently handle large amounts of images. As I get more into photography, I'm starting to think about how I can start adding images to my journal entries, or have galleries of images, without too much manual effort, or slowing down the site's build process. This also makes me wonder how static site generators can better support "partially dynamic" features. Yet another thing to think about for my future-website-generator project.
Life in Code by Ellen Ullman
Part memoir, part snapshots of life in the software industry, and part social commentary, this book is a must-read for anyone who wants an inside look at the software industry from a unique perspective. Ullman's personal anecdotes are interesting and often entertaining, but her thoughts on how the internet will lead to the spread of misinformation and decline of communities are prescient by several decades.
In the process of writing this, I realized I don't like how the links and their descriptions look, so there will probably be some CSS hackery in my near future. I suspect that in the process, the limitations of Markdown will cause me more frustration and make me wonder once more if I should just write HTML5 directly. I also really want to have a non-chronological notes section (for documenting things like the aforementioned move to Lightroom), but I will inevitably overthink and over-engineer what that looks like. Webweaving can be such an addictive hobby, one thing always leads to a whole bunch more.