November 3rd, 2020

Quite a red-letter day for my neighbours south of the border. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t anxious for tonight, so I better finish this weekly review as early as possible :^)

First off, my apologies for this post not being very Beeminder-specific, I’ve been getting dedicated with my development work with Jekyll the past week. So I haven’t really given the time needed to examine how my Beeminder goals have been affecting things in my life, like I usually (neurotically) do. I’m planning to do a full review of my now 24(!) systems.

Some bad news and good news: The bad news is that I definitely bit off more than I can chew with trying to modify Simply Jekyll. It already had a 1,300 line CSS file, and I decided it would be a good idea to add Bootstrap on top of that, and although I love how it looks and what it’s capable of, it’s hopelessly bloated.

The good news is that I successfully completed Hacktoberfest for the first time! But even better, I went back to the drawing board and created my first open-source project for others: Watery, which is the most minimal yet functional Jekyll theme I could create. I went down the rabbit hole of classless CSS frameworks and used the most popular one, Water.css, for this.

I also just added a neat feature on the demo site that lets you effortlessly see how it would look using a different classless CSS framework instead, which really demonstrates its extensibility.

To tie it back to relevancy, I am probably going to use a variant of this theme for my Beeminder blog journal.bar. Speaking of, I’ve been thinking more down-the-line about this experiment, and trying to figure out if there would be any meaningful way to measure difference from the beginning to, say, a year after. I can offer my own layman’s observations, but it’d be neat to be an academic guinea pig.

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November 3rd, 2020

About Brennan K. Brown