Consider this a sort of transparency report. As I mentioned in my recent Responsive Redesign post:
Though I’ve long been a staunch proponent of not self-censoring old content, I may start “unpublishing” some old posts that I feel have little or no redeeming value, besides being cringe-worthy indicators of where I was at the time.
This was a massive undertaking, that involved twice going through each and every one of the 2,088 posts I’ve published over the last 13 years (many of which I reread) and asking myself, Is this something I’m proud of? In the end, I answered No to 277 posts. The vast majority were culled from my early years of blogging. It’s hard to categorize the subject matter which most often fell under the knife, except to say that many of my old political or complainy rants had not aged well.
It began to pour the moment we pulled into our campsite. So we napped in the car waiting for our friends who were a few hours behind us. The rain had passed by the time Julie, Patrice, and their daughter Eva arrived, but the trees were still dripping, so we ate dinner that night with our rain jackets on.
I have finally abandoned the 380px-wide column that I chose arbitrarily for my first attempt at a blog design in 2002. That relatively narrow column became fixed when I began embedding photos in my posts, all scaled down to 380px-wide, shortly thereafter. To overcome this limitation, in 2009 I added the ability to enlarge photos using a Lightbox plugin. This meant that I had to manually generate a 380px-wide version and an 800px-wide version of every photo in a post, linking the former to the latter. I attempted a responsive redesign at the end of 2012, but it was really just a hack job. I got things into a place where they sort of worked, but stopped short because I had a new job to focus on. Finally in 2013, I abandoned the 380px-wide “thumbnails” altogether, and just started posting the 800px-wide versions—bandwidth be damned!—allowing the browser to scale the image down to my then-still, 380px-wide column. The benefit being that the newer high pixel density screens in smartphones and tablets showed much crisper images than they had previously.
One of my coworkers pointed out that I’m currently the poster boy for Bike to Work Day on the SF Bicycle Coalition website. The photo confused us both because yesterday, on Bike to Work Day, a group of coworkers organized a group ride to work, but none of them were visible in the shot. Then I realized that the jacket I had on in the photo was not the one I was wearing yesterday—so the photo must have been taken on a prior year, I’m guessing 2013, about a month after getting my new bike. In related news, I’m pretty close to being fully recovered from my broken elbow, and I’ve been biking to work every day since early April.
[After discovering a homeless person sleeping in our front yard this morning (the 3rd time this week), and having to call the police while rousing him, and having to clean up the mess he left behind, I decided to write an impassioned letter to San Francisco’s Mayor, Ed Lee, my district’s supervisor, Scott Weiner, and the Director of Housing Opportunity, Partnerships and Engagement (HOPE), Bevan Dufty, expressing my frustrations and feelings of helplessness. Posting it here (with minor typographic corrections) for posterity.]
