I managed to get 89 posts completed within the allotted year but the remaining 11 took me another 8.5 months! Still, the challenge did get me writing again, which was the main thing. During the time period of the challenge I became a father, moved from an apartment to a house, and started a new role at work, all while a global pandemic raged. My posts varied from slices of daily life, to more considered articles, to rediscovering the joy of writing poems (especially haikus!) for the first time in many, many years.
It's getting tense now as I enter the home straight of #100DaytoOffload. 15 days for 13 posts, including this one. That's a faster pace than I'd prefer so today will be a bit of a stream of consciousness that I add to as the day progresses. Let's start!
I've always preferred light themes but playing around with the Lagrange browser I really enjoy the way it presents the text-based Gemini space with its Colourful Dark theme, each capsule looking slightly different.
Pulled myself out of bed this morning to get the little one ready for nursery. Normally The Canadian does this (she's much better at mornings) but it was another night of interrupted sleep and feedings. Since I was up, I pulled on my running gear and after dropping off the babe, the wife and I went for our first 5k run together since 2016. Damn, that felt good!
When I started this blog, the “100 Days to Offload” challenge of 100 posts in a year seemed like a good target and it still is! It is an aspirational target and it doesn't really matter whether I hit it or not, what matters is that it has got me blogging again, putting words down on virtual paper. I've been having fun with it, typing out blog posts that range from serious to light-hearted, journal-style to the odd poem or two. It's been an outlet in a year of global lows with the pandemic and personal highs with the birth of my daughter. Still, let's see how I'm doing with the challenge itself!
Finally defeated the cardboard boxes again! After licking their wounds for a bit following the pre-baby box-clearance back in May, the boxes have been steadily re-infiltrating the household but enough was enough! I made time today in my leave to fight back and filled ten (yes TEN!) big green recycling bags with broken-down boxes from beer and baby purchases. Phew! That feels better! Must try to be more vigilant to prevent their next attempt to take over the apartment...
Nothing earth-shattering here but I've worked out how to link within a single page/post of the blog and added navigating options to the end of each post. Satisfying stuff, done in the wee hours of the morning when the world is quiet! Read on for the tips if interested!
Down the CSS wormhole we go again, hunting for the perfect sans-serif font for my blog, to make it stand out and add a personal touch. I wanted to find a font like Avenir Next, which is the one I use on my Kobo Aura One e-reader. I also wanted to avoid Google Fonts. After some deliberation, I narrowed it down to three options from https://fontlibrary.org, all distributed under the SIL Open Font Licence:
I've never needed to use CSS before. One of the most appealing things about the Write.as blogging platform is that it gets out of your way and just lets you write! However, I thought it was time to jazz up and personalise my blog a little and thus started my descent into a wormhole of swirling CSS code and endless colour hex possibilities. Fortunately, I'd attached a bungee cord to stop me descending too far into web design and never resurfacing to the land of blogging!