Plurrrr

week 13, 2019

The Swarm

Half past midnight I started in The Swarm by Frank Schätzing. This novel was recommended to me by my aunt Renate. She also recommended Ragdoll by Daniel Cole to me, which I finished earlier this month.

Google Search Console

After midnight I added Plurrrr to Google's Search Console. Right now it's processing data and I have to check again in a few days. I want to keep track of how well this site behaves on the Internet and if it attracts readers. Even though it's mostly a public notebook I do like to see other people visiting and hopefully enjoying this site.

Stylesheet made easy

I converted the stylesheet for this blog to Sass, a CSS extension language. This makes it easier to maintain the stylesheet and create other ones using different color schemes.

I generate the style sheet using:

sass --sourcemap=none \
     -t compressed \
     soothe.scss styles/soothe.css

The --sourcemap=none prevents /*# sourceMappingURL=soothe.css.map */ from being added to the end of the generated CSS file.

Holy Ghost

Two past twelve AM I finished Holy Ghost (A Virgil Flowers Novel) by John Sandford. It was an excellent read, recommended if you like mystery.

As it was already past midnight I blog this under a new day.

Emacs Color Themes

In the evening I browsed some Emacs color themes. My current theme is Charcoal Black, which I like a lot. I checked out once more an Emacs theme gallery, where I found last week Jason Milkin's Soothe theme that I used to pick the colors for this blog from. And I also checked out Emacs Themes and Owain Lewis' Emacs Themes.

From the latter page I like Brin, Graham, and Junio a lot. Maybe next month I try to make my own theme just like I did many years ago for Textpad, an editor running on Microsoft Windows. I probably am going to use Jason Milkin's Emacs Theme Editor.

First bug found

Found my first mistake in the tumblelog Perl program I wrote: I accidentally counted entries as days to limit the number of content on the main page. Since a day can have multiple entries this resulted in content already being moved off the front page. Easy fix: move the test outside of the innermost loop.

Major rewrite

Just finished a major rewrite of tumblelog.pl; the Perl program that generates the pages of this microblog. It now makes pages for each day besides week overviews.

To find or not to find

Why not use File::Find and do it all in perl?

asked Reddit user raevnos in response to my submission Driving a Perl script via find. To which I replied:

Good question, which the article should have answered. In my case I wanted to use find to drive the Perl program because I consider it slightly easier to edit and fix on the cli than in a program. Also, I wanted to learn a bit more about find and the speed difference between \; and \+. Finally, I can imagine that this solution is faster, and can be modified easier (with cli tools) by other (non-Perl) users.

A little wider now

On screens 480 pixels and wider this blog is now 480 pixels wide instead of 320 pixels. I used a CSS @media Rule as follows:

@media screen
    and (max-width: 479px) {
    #tl-page {
        width: 320px;
    }
}

Background image with opacity in CSS

I just used the following CSS code to create a body background image with opacity for work:

body::before {
  background-image: url("img.jpg");
  background-size: cover;
  content: "";
  display: block;
  position: absolute;
  top: 0;
  left: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  z-index: -2;
  opacity: 0.25;
}

Code comes from a well written article by Chris Love. Thanks!.

What the Plurrrrrr!

Years ago I bought the domain plurrr.com. Yesterday I started coding tumblelog.pl, the program that generates the static pages for this site, planning to use this domain. And today I noticed that I had let go this domain some time ago. So I just added one additional r. And hurray, plurrrr.com was available.