Weeknotes #001

I’ve watched Michael Camilleri write over 200 of these things so I thought it might be time to give it a shot myself. I can’t guarantee I’ll do this every week but I want to try and push myself out of my comfort zone a bit.

Sick, sick, sick

I spent last week in Montreal on a work trip and got home last Friday (after a 4 hour delay). The travel took a toll on me, clearly, since I’ve been battling a sore throat, cough, and head cold since getting home. I’ve tested for COVID a couple times and been negative so if there’s a silver lining, it’s that.

Blog updates

In between coughing fits, I found time to update a few pieces of my blog. Among the notable changes:

New footer design: The new version not only looks better but offers more functionality by housing social media accounts and my new blogroll.
Blogroll: As mentioned, I created a new menu that connects to the WordPress dashboard. This lets me easily add some of my favourite sites to have them show in the newly designed footer.
Now page: If you’re unfamiliar, a now page serves as a snapshot of the author’s current activities. In addition to a list of personal projects, I’ve added a widget from Literal to show what I’m reading (spoiler: it’s always manga), and tapped into the Last.fm API to show my most listened-to albums over the past week.
Photos page: I built a plugin for WordPress that creates a nice grid of all my photo posts. Photos only appear on this page, not in my post loop or RSS feed to reduce the noise. I don’t have many in there yet but I’m considering importing my old Instagram photos at some point.

Connections

This week, Keenan reached out by email with a quick hello. It was very nice. You can find their website in the blogroll below.

Wrapped / Recap

Spotify Wrapped and Apple Music Replay came out this week and, given I’ve switched between both this year, I was able to compare the two. I enjoy the simplicity of Apple’s version more than the graphically intense presentation Spotify goes with.

For those curious, I ended up with a total of over 45,000 minutes listened across both platforms and Beach Bunny was (unsurprisingly) my top artist.

Some dusty links

Here’s a few items from my Matter queue that’ve been sitting for a while.

↳ November 30th, 2023