Now I’m hooked! Setting all of my sites up in Dark Mode!

Special thanks to Andy over at The Dent! After about 20 minutes of work, my site is ready for Dark Mode using the Kiko Theme on Micro.blog.

@media (prefers-color-scheme:     dark) {
body {
color: #fafafa;
background-color: #1a1a1a; 
 }

.masthead-title a {
color: #ffffff;
}

h1.home-title {
color: #ffffff !important;
} 
 
h1.home-title a {
color: #ffffff !important;
} 

h1.page-title {
color: #ffffff !important;
} 

a {
color: #ffffff !important;
} 

strong {
color: #ffffff !important;
} 

blockquote p {
color: #ffffff !important;
}

a:hover, a:focus {
color: #F85F3F;
text-decoration: none;
}

.list-post-date a {
color: #F85F3F !important;
text-decoration: none;
border-bottom: none;
}

pre {
background-color: #1a1a1a !important;
}
}

Cotton Bureau makes nice things.

The IndieWeb Summit was held at the end of June in Portland. I didn’t attend, but through my involvement with Micro.blog, I’m familiar with the ideas and tools of the IndieWeb. The Internet has a tremendous capacity for open communication, and it’s available to anyone who wants to participate.

For far too many people, Facebook is their personal website, homepage, and basecamp for their web presence. For over a decade, I certainly used it that way. I’d share photos, updates, and satire news links for my friends to read. When I launched the Catholic Husband blog in 2013, I created a brand page. I’d post new articles, polls, and associated content. On the surface, it seemed to work, until it didn’t.

I like to tinker, and so when I changed my branding, I wanted to go back and change photos, update links, and make edits. The thing is, there isn’t a Facebook tool for handling your old posts. The only way to delete old posts is to basically delete your brand page, or even your entire account. No mass edits, nothing. The same held true for Twitter, except that there used to be 3rd party tools that would allow you to mass delete old tweets. I couldn’t tell you if those tools still work or if they were destroyed in Twitter’s war on innovation.

It’s been over a year since I deleted my Facebook/Instagram/Twitter and other social media profiles. I now control my domain and my presence on the web.

You may hear some people say that they control their presence, but what does it really mean?

I love to visit personal websites because they say a lot about the person. Web design is an incredibly expressive art. The layout, colors, formatting, and even fonts communicate beyond the mere text. It’s a statement of individuality, and a cue to my mind that this website represents a real person.

When Facebook is your website, they control everything. They control the layout, the colors, how your profile looks, and they change it whenever their business interests demand. They show you what they want to show, how they want to show you, and when they want to show you. And your profile, save for a few pictures, looks exactly like 2 billion other people’s profiles. No individuality, no expression.

Controlling your presence is about more than just the visual elements. It’s about the content itself. You can add, edit, subtract, sort, file, organize, and structure your content in any way that you please. And you can change it whenever you like.

I use RapidWeaver to design and publish most of my websites. When version 8 rolled out last summer, I got a whole new suite of tools for my blog posts. I now can control metadata for individual posts with ease.

Since I control my own website, I went back and redesigned the feature images for all 725 of my blog posts. Those posts represent my collective writing and publishing going back to the Spring of 2013. I used photos from Unsplash and a template that I created in Pixelmator. It was a lot of work to update all of those photos, but now every post has its own unique, branded photo. The visual difference is amazing. The experience is now 100% consistent, no matter which page or post you initially land on.

As I made those updates, I noted some posts that needed edits, changes, and typographical errors that needed to be fixed. I quickly and easily edited six year old blog posts because I wanted to improve my site.

Owning your content, managing your domain, and controlling your website is something that anyone can do. It takes some learning, lots of experimenting, and help and support from the community. To put it simply, when you do own and control your content, it’s yours to do with as you please.

It makes ZERO sense to give the second factor to the device trying to access the account. No way this is expected behavior.

A quick afternoon redesign on two of my pages. Nice to knock out a quick project with a big visual payoff.

For its 130th anniversary, The Wall Street Journal published a digital edition of their paper that features some of the biggest stories that they’ve covered. Really cool journalism and digital media.

Seeing the 737 MAX with its wings clipped is sad. I do, however, love the group shots with all of the different liveries. There’s some real art flying in the sky.

I don’t think that all of this criticism of Cook should get under his skin. He has strengths. Those strengths help him manage a global corporation. Product & design are not among them. That’s okay. Build the team to deliver and let them run.

Reaching page 100 in a book is always a satisfying milestone.

Good morning, World.

It’s okay to cancel a few items in Things.

Over the last decade, Apple has packaged music services in different ways. From listening to their explaining in the marketing to watching the Keynote presentations, I’ve never really understood them. iTunes Match, Music in the Cloud, even Apple Music: these are all complicated services.

I continue to find the user experience of Apple Music to be cumbersome. I mostly listen by using Siri commands, but even then, she’s not very good. If I forget a modifier in an album title (such as “the” or “and”), she usually doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Good luck if the album has the title of one of the songs on it.

That being said, Apple Music is great. Just about any song, artist, or genre is ready for me to listen to, at a moment’s request. I’ve listened to Weezer, OAR, Sigrid, Andrew McMahon, Kanye, Ólafur Arnalds, Linkin Park, Jack White, Relient K, George Winston, Matt Maher. I would never risk $12 or $15 to buy an album from an artist or band I’ve never heard of or only kind of like. Apple Music lowers the bar and opens up a world of discovery.

iTunes destroyed albums by offering one-off songs. Apple Music restores the art that is the music album. Singles are easy, albums are hard. They’re unique and cohesive stories, with a theme, all set to completely new melodies and different accompaniments. Pieced together, curated, and set in a certian order. Listening to an album from start to finish is a wonderful experience.

I still find it hard to describe to non-Apple Music subscribers what the value proposition is. In the end, it’s really a service that you have to experience to understand. And when you get it, it’s a whole new world of musical discovery.

Murder Mystery 🍿

Netflix date night.

Fire this designer.