Category: Uncategorized

January challenge

est.

During the month of January my wife suggested a challenge for both of us to do a drawing every day for the month, as something new and fun to do (we are both also Art graduates having met at University in the 90s).

The specific type of drawing was to be a map.

And we did it. Here are my drawings for the month.

Day 1 - Map featuring a road and mountains and tress - Pen
Day 2 - Map featuring a ring road and some buildings - Pen
Day 3 - Map featuring the sea, a sail boat, sea monster and a lighthouse - Pen and Watercolour
Day 4 - Map of an island - Roller ball
Day 5 - Map featuring a path with some palm trees - Ink
Day 6 - Map of a route of my journey that day - Pen
Day 7 - Map of a weird 3d island thing - Ink
Day 8 - Map featuring two intersecting roads with a house on it - Ink and market
Day 9 - Map of a made up town - Pen
Day 10 - Tubę tyle map - Pen
Day 11 - Map resembling a google map - Marker pen and tippex
Day 12 - Map looking a little like a modernist take on the A-Z - Ink and Tape
Day 13 - Abstract with some clouds, birds, signposts and other map type features - Ink
Day 14 - Map of the sea, islands and land - Water colour
Day 15 - Map featuring a lighthouse and some hills - Pen
Day 16 - Map of some planes and some flight paths - Coloured pencils and pe
Day 17 - Map with lots of S-bend roads and some trees - Ink
Day 18 - Isometric map, with some roads a building and some trees/grass - Pen and coloured pens
Day 19 - Isometric map, with a mountain - Ink and watercolours
Day 20 - Map with many small islands and sea - Ink and watercolours
Day 21 - Map of a road in a sort of spiral - Pen
Day 22 - Map of a landscape with lots of grass and a few mountains a river, tiny flora and fauna - Ink and watercolours
Day 23 - Map of a tributary - Coloured pens
Day 24 - Map of a mountain with Skiing routes in different colours - Pencil and coloured pencils
Day 25 - Map of the World (well America / Europe and Africa as it wouldn't fit on the page) - Ink and marker pens
Day 26 - Abstract map representing a bike route which I was about to do - Coloured pencils
Day 27 - Map with some roads and a google pin - Graphite and ball point pen
Day 28 - Map of the elevation I did on a recent bike ride - Pencil
Day 29 - Isometric drawing of a treasure map - Ball point pe
Day 30 - Map of the Solar System - Pen and coloured pencil
Day 31 - Map of all previous maps - Ink on Papyrus

FSE

est.

Decided I am going to use this site to build my first Full Site Editing WordPress theme.

So all HTML, JSON and CSS. No PHP (well some PHP obvs, it’s still WordPress. You need (for now at least) functions.php so you can add stuff like a custom CSS file and other stuff). I’m going to use this theme by Fränk Klein as a starting point, turning everything off so I can gradually turn it back on again.

I’ve been building themes since 2004, maybe even 2003. It’s going to be weird. 18/19 years of pretty much the same syntax. No idea when I’ll launch it, but sometime soon.

Sleep well sweet prince. 

<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>		
	<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<?php the_title(); ?>
		<?php the_content(); ?>
	<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Website goes to 11(ty)

est.

I’ve been playing around with Nunjucks and various static site generators (SSGs) over the last couple of years now. Building my smaller non-CMSy sites seasonal.today, richholman.com, phonebox.photos using a mixture of techniques and build scripts.

I’ve loved it, its’s like olden days web development, HTML, CSS, Javascript but with super powers. Gulp scripts taking the mundane tasks such as image resizing and optimisation, favicon generation, script and styles pre and post processing and much more.

Around a year ago (I think, pandemics have destroyed my concept of time) I started to use 11ty after playing around the edges for a while. It’s even more of a delight, it get’s out of the way, taking care of all the hard stuff so wonderfully. Local and remote data becomes such an easy thing. It’s concept of ‘collections’ is excellent, here’s my content type based on a local data file (say an object) or remote fetch (API, graphQL), here’s the template I want it to use and voila here’s the output.

A list of folders

You can use Nunjucks natively (or Liquid, Markdown, Moustache, Handlebars and more). Passing front matter into the markdown files allows for page / folder specific variables.

Anyhoo, after converting a couple of my sites to 11ty seasonal.today and phonebook.photos both with data defined locally I wanted to try out something I’ve been meaning to do for a while….headless WordPress 💪.

And where better (and safer) to start than this blog as the source data.

There was a bit faffing about but I took a lot of inspiration from these articles / repos: How to use 11ty with Headless WordPress and deploy to Netlify, WordPress & Eleventy part one: WordPress, 11ty-wordpress-graphql.

So I now have a mirror site for this blog all built in 11ty. 11ty.dgw.ltd

I’ve blocked search engines from indexing it obvs. I tried to have the smallest footprint for it as well, so no client-side JS, 26KB of CSS. I even used some Tailwind (don’t generally like it, too many class names for this ageing brain) but I really liked this approach to typography. Just using the classname ‘prose’ on the container. Nice. I eschewed my goto build using Gulp and just do it all the build with npm built-in scripts.

I would like to trigger a build of the site when I hit publish on a post from WordPress, but given I post about once a decade running npm run build and git add commit push is not exactly a big deal.

Update: I rebuilt the 11ty instance and now this post, in a sort of hall of mirrors type afair, exists on the 11ty instance. 👻👻👻

18

est.

This is blog is now officially old enough to drink, so dogwonder.co.uk is off to the pub for a shandy.

Where did all the years go eh? That also means this is 18 years of WordPress – although this wasn’t my first WP site but not far off. I think this started on version 1.2, and here I am publishing this from a ‘smart phone’ using ’the block editor’ (back in my day it was all fields etc).

Anyhoo we’re (?) off to raise glass.

Till 19.

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