Dan Q
This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Maintenance check while walking the dog. Cleared some overgrown plants, but watch out because the nearby nettles ate still a little fierce (cache can be retrieved without a sting though!). Cache itself intact and healthy.
I’ve long been a fan of Hugh Howey‘s Wool series of books (especially the first and third; the second’s a bit weaker); in fact I’ve been enjoying re-reading them as a bedtime story for our eldest!1
Naturally, when I heard that it would become a TV series I was really excited! I’m enjoying the series so far, especially thanks to its epic casting. It diverges a lot from the books – sometimes in ways I love, sometimes in ways that confuse me – but that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to share how cool the opening credits sequence is!
Spoiler warning: even if you’re following the TV series there are likely to be major spoilers below based on my recollection of the books!
We open on the sun shining above a thick layer of all-obscuring clouds, tinted sickly yellow like poison gas, then descend into the darkness below. This hints at the uninhabitability of the world above, foreshadows Lukas stargazing through gaps in the clouds2, and foreshadows revelations about the argon gas used to flush the airlocks. The descent feels representative of humanity’s migration from the sunlit surface to the underground silos.
Looking down, we see the silo from above in a desolate landscape, introducing the world and its setting. The area around it is shrouded and hostile, reflecting the residents’ view of the outside world as unsurvivable, but also masking our view of the other nearby silos that we might otherwise be able to see.
Descending “into” this representation of the silo, we get a view for only a split second that looks distinctly like the platter and spindle of a magnetic hard disk drive, broken-up as if to represent corruption. This reflects a number of major plot points in the first season relating to the destruction and recovery of secret information from ancient storage devices.
Truly within the silo now, we see the spokes of landings radiating out from the great stairwell. The shape is reminiscient of a cog: a motif we’ll return to later. Humanoid shapes made of light, like you get in a long exposure, move around, giving both the idea of a surveillance state, and setting us up to think of all such “glowing spots” as people (relevant later in the credits).
A representation of the stairwell itself appears, with a lit gaseous substance whipping up and down it. Given that we’ve just been shown that this kind of “light” represents people, it’s easy to see this as showing us the traffic that grinds up and down the silo, but it also feels like looking at part of a great machine, pumping gas through a condenser: notice that there’s no landings any more: this is all about the never-ending traffic.
A landing appears, and the gaseous forms are now more-clearly humanoid, almost as if they’re ghosts (perhaps pointing to the number of generations who’ve lived before, in this place, or else a reference to Juliette’s investigation into the lives of those who lived before her).
More swirling gas-people, this time below an empty balconette: perhaps a nod to the source of Juliette’s uncommon name (in the books, it’s taken from Romeo & Juliet, a possibly-illicit copy of which is retained by the silo and performed prior to Juliette’s birth and for at least a short while afterwards: she writes mechanical notes on the back of a playscript), or perhaps a reference to George’s death after “falling” from a balcony.
Seen from a different angle, the colour shifts, and the gas/ghosts become white like the argon spray of the airlock. The people are all part of a machine: a machine that sends people outside to clean and die. But more than that, the blue comes to represent a clean/perfect view of what a silo can be: a blueprint representation of the goals of its creators to shape the inhabitants into their vision of the future:
We refocus on the shape of the silo itself, but just for a split second the view looks more like an x-ray… of a human spine? As if to remind us that it’s people who upload the system of the silo, just as its concrtete uploads its physical structure. Also a reminder that the silo is treated (by those who manage it, both within and beyond it) as an organic thing that can be nurtured, grown, or if necessary killed.
This becomes the structure of the silo, but it almost looks architectural: a “clean” look, devoid of people or signs of life, like a blueprint, perhaps foreshadowing Donald’s role in designing the structures that will eventually become the silos. The “space” between the arms is emphasised, showing how the social system that this structure imposes serves to separate and segregate people: classism is a recurring theme in both the books and the TV series, and it eventually becomes apparent that the silos are specifically organised to reduce communication between interdependent groups.
Returning to the “populated” silo – swirls of gas spiralling away down (or up: it’s no longer clear!), we catch a glimpse of a nautilus shell at the centre. The nautilus is a “living fossil”, a creature from a bygone era that continues to survive in our modern world, which is an excellent metaphor for the population of the dead world who go on living beneath its surface. The nautilus shell is a recurring image within the TV series: Gloria’s visions of the world that came before see her clutching one and tracing its shape, for example.
We cut to what appears to be a seed, representing both the eventual conclusion of the story (Juliette, Charlotte and the Silo 18 survivors’ discovery of the cache of supplies that will allow them to begin rebuilding the world) and also the nature of the silo3. The seed we see initially appears to fail and degrade, becoming nothing at all, before eventually growing into the beginnings of a strong new plant. This could represent the eventual and inevitable collapse of silo 18, among others, but the eventual flourishing of those that survive, or on a broader scale the collapse of modern civilization to be replaced by the silos, or even of the silo system to be replaced with that which follows it after the conclusion of the story. Lots of options!
It’s also possibly a reflection of the harsh and opaque eugenics/population control mechanism imposed by the “lottery”, which becomes a major plot point in the TV series much earlier than in the books.
We cut to trees, thriving despite a yellow fog. The sky can’t be seen, which is a reminder that all of humanity’s resources must now be produced underground (trees are especially rare and prized, leading to a shortage of paper4. It seems to be deliberately left unclear whether the trees we see are on the surface before the fall of humanity, on the surface after the fall, or grown underground.
A fruit falls from the tree, which links back to the seed we saw geminate earlier but also seems likely to be a representation of the concept of original sin. The grand idea of the silos was to create a better world on the other side of a man-made catastrophe, but this idea is inherently flawed because the systems that are constructed by the same people who are complicit in the destruction of the world that came before. The structure that’s put in place through the Pact carries the weight of the sins of its creators: even though the inhabitants of silo 1 ultimately intend to destroy themselves, they’re unable to create a new world that is both better than the one that came before and free from their influence: it’s an impossibility.
It’s also possibly a representation of the religious beliefs of some inhabitants that the creators of the silo should be revered as gods. This was a recurring plot point in the books but has been somewhat muted in the TV series so far.
The metaphor continues when we see that this falling fruit is already beginning to rot, degrading as it tumbles towards the earth. We don’t see it strike the ground: it almost seems to hover in the air, uncertain and undecided, and reflective of the eventual end when the inhabitants of the silos break free from the shackles of the system that’s been constructed for them and can choose their own destiny. Or perhaps we don’t see the collision simply because the camera continues to fall down into the earth and below the surface again?
This time, wer’e very deep: all the way down in the depths of Mechanical, at the bottom of the silo: home to our heroine and source of many aspects of the story. In the centre, a shaft descends, connecting us back to the “spine” of the silo – the great staircase – but it’s harder to see as a wealth of machinery appears to support it, occluding our view. From down here in Mechanical it appears that the machines keep the silo running, whereas further up it looked like humans pumped through it like blood, which reflects Juliette’s disagreements with many of those up-top about their priorities during her time as Sheriff and, later, as Mayor.
We see a cloud of steam, like that used to drive the generator that brings life to the silo, and for a moment it’s impossible to differentiate it from the cloud of people we saw earlier, rushing up and down the stairs. Look closely at the steam, though, and you’ll see that it too contains the ghosts of people.
Deeper still, the cog motif returns and we’re buried in an impossible number of interconnected gears. The machine that they support is impossible to comprehend from within: How big is it? What is it for? Who made it and why?
The final cog mutates into the staircase again, winding away from us and hammering the point home.
The staircase changes again, first becoming an outline of itself (a callback to the “blueprint” design we saw earlier, reminding us that this thing was designed to be like this)…
…but this becomes a double-helix, representing the chaos of life. Again, the metaphor is of a perfect idea constructed to achieve a goal, but the unpredictability of humans leads to a different outcome.
Seen from above, the staircase now looks like an enormous clock, a machine of cogs each turning slower than the one beneath, counting down until the end of the silo experiment in accordance with the whim of its creators. Except, of course, if something were to break this machine.
Seen from the side, the silo is a hive of activity, but the shape the levels form in this depiction are exactly like the rotors of a steam turbine, and this is reflected by an image of steam, almost in the shape of a growing tree – passing behind it in the background. The generator and its rotor blades is a significant early plot point in both the books and the TV series, and the books in particular use engine metaphors to explain Juliette’s interpretation of different situations she finds herself in, even those which are distinctly interpersonal rather than mechanical.
Looking back up the silo, towards the light, we can now see its shape and structure for what it is: just another cog – a part of an even bigger machine that is the whole Operation Fifty silo network. The people are the lifeblood of this machine, but they’re as replaceable and interchangable as any other part.
Finally, we crossfade to the title, looking like a stencil. Each letter is more-degraded than the one before it, representing the impossibility of building a perfect system.
The credits sequence is less than 90 seconds long, but so much is packed into it. It’s just great.
1 We’re into the final act of Dust now and it’s been amazing to experience the characters – loveable and hateable – of the series.
2 Curiously, in the TV series Lukas is only ever seen stargazing on clear nights, which is one of those confusing choices I mentioned. I suspect it’s for aesthetic reasons and to help add some romance to Juliette and Lukas’s courtship.
3 A silo is, of course, a place to store something valuable through the hard times. This is exactly what the silos in this story are for.
4 The shortage of paper shows up many times in the books but is somewhat glossed-over in the TV series. I’m not sure how they’ll reconcile that with the impact of the discovery of the Legacy, later.
I have minus 26 new articles in my RSS reader! Either I’m a time traveller, or there’s a wraparound bug when you neglect your unreads for long enough.
Both seem equally likely, if I’m honest.
My second day of the main conference part of WordCamp Europe 2023 was hampered slightly by a late start on my part.
Still, I managed to get to all the things I’d earmarked for my attention, including:
I’m sure I can’t be the only person who’s been asked “why can’t the (or ‘shouldn’t the’) WordPress post editor let multiple people edit post at the same time”. Often, people will compare it to e.g. Google Docs.
Dawid summarised the challenging issues in any effort to implement this much-desired feature. Some of them are examples of those unsolved problems that keep rearing their heads in computer science, like the two generals’ problem, but even the solvable problems are difficult: How does one handle asynchronous (non-idempotent) commutative operations? How is the order of disparate actions determined? Which node is the source of truth? If a server is used, where is that server (with a nod to quite how awful the experience of implementing a Websockets server in PHP can be…)? And so on…
I really appreciated Dawid’s reference to the various bits of academic literature that’s appeared over the last four decades (!) about how these problems might be solved. It’s a strong reminder that these things we take for granted in live-updating multi-user web applications are not trivial and every question you can answer raises more questions.
There’s some great early proof-of-concepts, so we’re “getting there”, and it’s an exciting time. Personally, I love the idea of the benefits this could provide for offline editing (perhaps just because I’m still a huge fan of a well-made PWA!).
James Giroux’s goal: that we all become more curious about and more invested in our team’s experiences, from a humanistic standpoint. His experience of companies with organic growth of software companies is very, very familiar: you make a thing and give it away, then you need more people, then you’ve somehow got a company and it’s all because you just had an idea once. Sounds like Three Rings!
James was particularly keen to share with us the results of his Team Experience Index research, and I agree that some of the result are especially exciting, in particularly the willingness of underrepresented groups, especially women, to enagage with the survey: this provides hugely valuable data about the health of teams working in the WordPress space.
“We have this project that we work with and contribute to, that we love,” says James, in an attempt to explain the highly-positive feedback that his survey respondents gave when asked questions about the authenticity of their purpose and satisfaction in their role.
So, what do we do with these findings? How do WordPress-ey companies improve? James recommends that we:
Good tips, there.
A WordCamp tradition is to try to squeeze every willing participant into a photo. Clearly with the size that these events are, nowadays, this requires some wrangling (and, in this case, the photographers standing atop the roof of a nearby building to get everybody into frame).
I’ll have to keep an eye out for the final picture and see if I can find myself in it.
I always find that learning about bleeding edge CSS techniques makes me feel excited and optimistic, perhaps because CSS lends itself so well towards a progressive enhancement approach to development: often, you can start using a new technique today and it’ll only benefit, say, people using a beta version of a particular browser (and perhaps only if they opt-in to the applicable feature flag). But if you’ve designed your site right then the lack of this feature won’t impact anybody else, and eventually the feature will (hopefully) trickle-down into almost everybody’s Web experience.
Anyway, that’s what Fellyph Cintra says too, but he adds that possibly we’ve still not grown out of thinking that browsers take a long time between versions. 5 years passed between the release of Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7, for example! But nowadays most browsers are evergreen with releases each month! (Assuming we quietly ignore that Apple don’t sent new versions of Safari to old verisons of MacOS, continuing to exacerbate a problem that we used to see with Internet Explorer on Windows, ahem.)
<dialog> to his team and they responded with skepticism that they’d be able to use it within the next 5 years. But in fact
it’s already stable in every major browser.
An important new development may come from Baseline, a project to establish a metric of what you can reliably use on the Web today. So a bit like Can I Use, I guess, but taken from the opposite direction: starting from the browsers and listing the features, rather than the other way around.
Anyway, Fellyph went on to share some exciting new ideas that we should be using, like:
object-fit and object-position, which can make the contents of any container “act like” a background
aspect-ratio, which I’m already using and I love, but I enjoyed how Fellyph suggested combining the two to crop images to a fluid container on the client side
scroll-behavior: smooth, which I’ve used before; it’s pretty good
clamp, which I use… but I’m still not sure I fully grok it: I always have to load some documentation with examples when I use it
@container queries, which can apply e.g. (max-width: ...) rules to things other than the viewport, which I’ve not found a need for yet but I can see the
value of it
@layers, which grant an additional level of importance in the cascade: for example, you might load a framework into a layer (with @import url(...)
layer(framework)) which is defined as a lower-priority than your override layer, meaning you won’t have to start slapping !important all over the shop
@media (400px <= width <= 600px)-style media queries, which are much easier to understand than min-width: if you’re used to thinking in a
more-procedural programming language (I assume they work in container queries too!)
It’s also worth remembering:
@supports, which is badass and I love and use it already (it was especially useful as display: grid began to roll out and I wanted to start using it but
needed to use a fallback method for browsers that didn’t support it yet
:has(), which I’ve long thought is game-changing: styling something based on what it contains is magical; not really suitable for mainstream use yet without
Firefox support, though (it’s still behind a feature flag)! Fellyph sold me on the benefit of :not(:has(...)), though!
animation-timeline: and
animation-range: to specify that it’s the scroll position within the document that provides the timeline for the animation
And keeping an eye on upcoming things like text-balanced (which I’m already excited by), popover, selectmenu, view transitions (which I’ve been
experimenting with because they’re cool), and scoped style.
Fellyph was at least as inspiring as I’d hoped.
For my second workshop, I joined Google’s Adam Silverstein to watch him dissect a few participants’ websites performance using Core Web Vitals as a metric. I think I already know the basics of Core Web Vitals, but when it comes to improving my score (especially on work-related sites with unpleasant reliance on heavyweight frameworks like React, in my experience).
We talked a lot about render blocking (thanks to JS and CSS in the
<head>), thread blocking (by scripts, especially those reacting to user input), TTFB (relating to actual network
and server performance, or at least server-side processing), TBT (the time between FCP and TTI), and the upcoming change to measure INP rather than FID. That’s a lot of acronyms.
The short of it is that there are three pillars to Core Web Vitals: loading (how long until the page renders), interactivity (how long until the page responds to user interaction), and stability (how long it takes for the page to cease layout shifts as a result of post-load scripts and stylesheets). I was pleased that Adam acknowledged the major limitation of lab testing resulting from developers often using superior hardware and Internet connections to typical users, and how if you’re serious about performance metrics you’ll want to collect RUM data.
I came away with a few personalised tips, but they’re not much use for your site: I paid attention to the things that’ll be helpful for the sites I look after. But I’ll be taking note of his test pages so I can play with some of the tools he demonstrated later on.
I couldn’t liveblog this because I spent too much of the session applauding. A few highlights from memory:
Here’s looking forward to WordCamp Europe 2024 in Turin!
This checkin to GC5KBK3 ISAP: Omonia reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found! Took a bit of a search, because I had looked at the hint image which shows several trees at the GZ that are no longer there, so I was left thinking I must be in the wrong place for a while! TFTC, and greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
The first “full” day of WordCamp Europe 2023 (which kicked-off at Contributor Day) was busy and intense, but I loved it.
This post is basically a live-blog of everything I got up to, and it’s mostly for my own benefit/notetaking. If you don’t read it, nobody will blame you.
Here’s what I got up to:
David Artiss took the courageous step of installing 36 popular plugins onto a fresh WordPress site and was, unsurprisingly, immediately bombarded by a billion banners on his dashboard. Some were merely unhelpful (“don’t forget to add your API key”), others were annoying (“thanks for installing our plugin”), and plenty more were commercial advertisements (“get the premium version”) despite the fact that WordPress.org guidelines recommend against this. It’s no surprise that this kind of “aggressive promotion” is the single biggest annoyance that people reported when David asked around on social media.
Similarly, plugins which attempt to break the standard WordPress look-and-feel by e.g. hoisting themselves to the top of the menu, showing admin popovers, putting settings sections in places other than the settings submenu, and so on are a huge annoyance to everybody. I get sufficiently frustrated by these common antifeatures of plugins I use that I actually maintain a plugin for my own use that “fixes” the ones that aggrivate me the most!
David’s promised to put his slides online, plus to write articles about everything that came up in his Q&A.
I’m unconvinced that we can rely on plugin developers to independently fix the kinds of problems that come high on David’s list. I wonder if there’s mileage in WordPress Core reimplementing the way that the main navigation menu works such that all items in it can be (easily) re-arranged by users to their own preference? This would undermine the perceived value to plugin developers of “hoisting” their own to the top by allowing users to counteract it, and would provide a valuable feature to allow site admins to streamline their workflow: use WooCommerce but only in a way that’s secondary to your blog? Move “Products” below “Posts”! Etc.
Aaron Reimann from ClockworkWP gave us a tour of how WordPress has changed over the course of its 20-year history, starting even slightly before I started using WordPress; my blog (previously powered by some hacky PHP, previouslier powered by some hackier Perl, previousliest written in static HTML) switched to WordPress in 2004, when it hit version 1.2, so it was fun to get the opportunity to see some even older versions illustrated.
It was great to be reminded how far the Core code has come over that time. Early versions of WordPress – as was common among PHP applications at the time! – had very few files and each could reliably be expected to be a stack of SQL, wrapped in a stack of code, wrapped in what’s otherwise a HTML file: no modularity!
There were very few surprises for me in this talk, as you might expect for such an “old hand”, but I really enjoyed the nostalgia of exploring WordPress history through his eyes.
I enjoyed putting him on the spot with a “spicy” question at the end of his talk, by asking him if, alongside everything we’ve gained over the years, whether there’s anything we lost along the way. He answered well, pointing out that the somewhat bloated stack of plugins that are commonplace on big sites nowadays and the ease with which admins can just “click and install” more of them. I agree with him, although personally I miss built-in XFN support…
There’s a lot of exhibitors with stands, but I tried to do a circuit or so and pay attention at least to those whose owners I’ve come into contact with in a professional capacity. Many developers who make extensions for WooCommerce, of course, sell those extensions through WooCommerce.com, which means they come into routine direct contact with my code (and it can mean that when their extension’s been initially rejected by our security scanners or linters, it’s me their developers first want to curse!).
It’s been great to connect with people using WordPress to power the Web in a whole variety of different contexts, but it somehow still feels strange to me that WordPress has such a commercial following! Even speaking as somebody who’s made their living at least partially out of WordPress for the last decade plus, it still feels to me like its greatest value comes from its use for personal publishing.
The feel of a WordCamp with its big shiny sponsors is enormously different from, say, the intimacy and individuality of a Homebrew Website Club meeting, and I think that’s something I still need to come to terms with. WordPress’s success story comes from many different causes, but perhaps chief among them is the fact that it’s versatile enough to power the website of a government, multinational, or household-name brand… but also to run the smallest personal indie blog. I struggle to comprehend that, even with my background.
(Side note, Sophie Koonin says that building a personal website is a radical act in 2023, and I absolutely agree.)
I was proud of my colleagues for the “gimmick” they were using to attract people to the Woo stand: you could pick up a “credit card” and use it to make a purchase (of Greek olive oil) using a website, see your order appear on the app at the backend in real-time, and then receive your purchase as a giveaway. The “credit card” doubles as a business card from the stand, the olive oil is a real product from a real, local producer (who really uses WooCommerce to sell online!), and when you provide an email address at the checkout you can opt-in to being contacted by the team afterwards. That’s some good joined-up thinking by my buddies in marketing!
Petya Petkova observed that it’s commonplace to take the easy approach and make a website look like… well, every other website. “Web deja-vu” is a real thing, and it’s fed not only by the ebbs and flows of trends in web design but by the proliferation of indistinct themes that people just install-and-use.
Choice of colours and typography can be used to tell a story, to instil a feeling, to encourage engagement. Scrolling can be used as a metaphor for storytelling (“scrolly-telling”, Petya calls it). Animation flow can be used to direct a user’s attention and drive focus and encourage interaction.
A lot of the technical concepts she demonstrated – parts of a page that scroll at different speeds, typography that shifts or changes, videos used in a subtle way to accentuate other content, etc. – can be implemented in the frontend with WebGL, Three.js and the like. Petya observes that moving this kind of content interactivity into the frontend can produce an illusion of a performance improvement, which is an argument I’ve heard before, but personally I think it’s only valuable if it’s built as a progressive enhancement: otherwise, you’re always at risk that your site won’t look like you’d hope.
I note, for example, that Petya’s agency’s site shows only an “endless spinner” when viewed in my browser (which blocks the code.jQuery CDN by default, unless allowlisted for specific sites). All of the content is there, on the page, if you View Source, but it’s completely invisible if an external JavaScript fails to load. That doesn’t just happen when weirdos like me disable JavaScript in their browsers: it can happen if the browser interacts badly with the script, or if the user’s Internet connection is ropey, or a malware scanner misfires, or if government censorship blocks the CDN, or in any number of other conditions.
So yeah: uniqueness and creativity are great, and I like what she’s proposing, but not the way she goes about it. The first person to ask a question wisely brought up accessibility, and
Petya answered well that accessibility technologies can bridge the gap, but I’d counter that it’s preferable to build accessible in the first instance: if you have to
use an aria- attribute it’s a good sign that you probably already did something wrong (not always, but it’s certainly a pointer that you ought to take a step back
and check!).
Several other good questions and great answers followed: about how to showcase a preliminary design when they design is dependent upon animation and interactivity (which I’ve witnessed before!), on the value of server-side rendering of components, and about how to optimise for smaller screens. Petya clearly knows her stuff in all of these areas and had confident responses.
Oliver Sild is the kind of self-taught hacker, security nerd, and community builder that I love, so I wasn’t going to miss his talk.
It’s good news in general in WordPress Security-land… but CSRF is on the up-and-up (overtaking XSS) in the plugin space. That, and all the broken access control we see in the admin area, are things I’ll be keeping in mind next time I’m arguing with a vendor about the importance of using nonces and security checks in their extension (I have this battle from time to time!).
But an interesting development is the growth of the supply chains in the WordPress plugin ecosystem. Nowadays a plugin might depend upon another plugin which might depend upon a library… and a patch applied to the latter of those might take time to be propagated through the chain, providing attackers with a growing window of opportunity.
A worrying thought is that while plugin directory administrators will pull and remove plugins that have longstanding unactioned security issues. But that doesn’t help the sites that already have that plugin installed and are still using it! There’s a proposal to allow WordPress to notify admins if a plugin used on a site has been dropped for security reasons, but it was opened 9 years ago and hasn’t seen any real movement, soo…
I like that Oliver plugged for security researchers being acknowledged as equal contributors to developers on your software. But then, I would say that, as somebody who breaks into things once in a while and then tells the affected parties how to fix the problem that allowed me to do so! He also provided a whole wealth of tips for site owners and agencies to try to keep their sites safe, but little that I wasn’t aware of already.
It was about this point in the day, glancing at my schedule and realising that at any given time there were up to four other sessions running simultaneously, that I really got
a feel for the scale of this conference. Awesome. Meanwhile, Oliver was fielding the question that I’m sure everybody was thinking: with Gutenberg blocks powered by JavaScript that are
often backed by a supply-chain of the usual billion-or-so files you find in your .node_modules directory, isn’t the risk of supply chain attacks increasing?
Spoiler: yes. Did you notice earlier in this post I mentioned that I don’t use Gutenberg on this site yet?
My first “workshop” was run by Giulia Laco, on the topic of readable content and design.
Giulia began by reminding us how short the attention span of Web readers is, and how important the right typographic choices are in ensuring that people actually read your content. I fully get this – I think that very few people will have the attention span to read this part of this very blog post, for example! – but I loved that she hammered the point home by presenting every slide of her presentation twice (or more), “improving” the typographic choices as she went along: an excellent and memorable quirk.
Our capacity to read and comprehend a text is affected by a combination of common (distance, lighting, environment, concentration, mood, etc.), personal (age, proficiency, motiviation,
accessibility requirements, etc.), and typographic (face, style, size, line length and spacing, contrast, width, rhythm etc.) factors. To explore the impact of the typographic factors,
the group dived into a pre-prepared Codepen and a shared Figma diagram. (I immediately had a TIL moment over the font-synthesis: CSS property!)
Things get interesting at the intersection of readability and accessibility. For example, WCAG accessibility requirements demand that you don’t use images of text (we used to do this a lot back before we could reliably use fonts on the web, and before we could easily have background images on e.g. buttons for navigation). But this accessibility requirement also aids screen readability when accounting for e.g. “retina” screens with virtual pixel ratios.
Giulia provided a great explanation of why we may well think in pixels (as developers or digital designers) but we’re unlikely to use them everywhere: I’d internalised this lesson long ago but I appreciated a well-explained justification. The short of it is: screen zoom (that fancy zoom feature you use in your browser all the time, especially on mobile) and text zoom (the one you probably don’t use, or don’t use so much) are different things, and setting a pixel-based font size in the root node wrecks the latter, forcing some people with accessibility needs to use the former, which is likely to result in vertical scrolling. Boo!
I also enjoyed seeing this demo of how the different hyphenation-points in different languages (because of syllable stress) can impact on your wrapping points/line lengths when content is translated. This can affect any website, of course, because any website can be the target of automatic translation.
Plus, Giulia’s thoughts on the value of serifed fonts (even on digital displays) for improving typographic readability of the letters d, b, p and q which are often mirror- or rotationally-symmetric to one another in sans-serif fonts. It’s amazing to have something – in this case, a psychological letter transposition – pointed out that I’ve experienced but never pinned down the reason for, before. Neat!
It was a shame that this workshop took place late in the day, because many of the participants (including me) seemed to have flagging energy levels!
Altogether a great (but intense) day. Boggles my mind that there’s another one like it tomorrow.
Among the many perks of working for a company with a history so tightly-intertwined with that of the open-source WordPress project is that license to attend WordCamps – the biggest WordPress conferences – is basically a given.
It’s frankly a wonder that this is, somehow, my first WordCamp. As well as using it1 and developing atop it2, of course, I’ve been contributing to WordPress since 2004 (albeit only in a tiny way, and not at all for most of the last decade!).
Today is Contributor Day, a pre-conference day in which folks new and old get together in person to hack on WordPress and WordPress-adjacent projects. So I met up with Cem, my Level 4 Dragonslayer friend, and we took an ultra-brief induction into WP-CLI3 before diving in to try to help write some code.
So today, as well as meeting some awesome folks, I got to write an overly-verbose justification for a bug report being invalid and implement my first PR for WP-CLI: a bugfix for a strange quirk in output formatting.
--no-color.
I hope to be able to continue contributing to WP-CLI. I learned a lot about it today, and while I don’t use it as much as I used to in my multisite-management days, I still really respect its power as a tool.
1 Even with the monumental stack of custom code woven into DanQ.me, a keen eye will probably spot that it’s WordPress-powered.
2 Perhaps my proudest “built on WordPress” moment was my original implementation of OpenID for WordPress, back in 2005, which is completely obsolete now. But I’ve done plenty of other things, both useful (like the multisite installation used by the University of Oxford) and pointless (like making WordPress a CMS for Gemini, Gopher, and Finger) too over the last 20 years.
3 WP-CLI is… it’s like Drush but for WordPress, if that makes sense to you? If not: it’s a multifaceted command-line tool for installing, configuring, maintaining, and managing WordPress installations, and I’ve been in love with it for years.
This checkin to GC1B0P5 The Runner reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
What a great statue! Cache was very easy to find; despite its camo it was very visible as I walked along the adjacent path. Thanks for bringing me out of my way on my walk from my hotel to the conference I’m attending, and TFTC. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
This checkin to GC2K167 Petraki Monastery - NIMTS reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
QEF once I found the right hiding place! TFTC, and for the excuse to divert my morning walk this way. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
This checkin to GC97N64 Under the Bridge reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Walking from my hotel to the site of a conference I’m attending, this morning, I stopped to find this cache. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to spot this sneaky little container! Greetings from Oxford, UK, and TFTC!
This checkin to GC9WD6N Peter's reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Saw the notification when this cache appeared near my house, which would normally be the point at which a race was kicked off between me and Go Catch for the FTF, before he inevitably got there first!
But this time around I was overseas when the listing went live and only found time to cycle out here from Stanton Harcourt this evening, after work. I’d visited the church here once before in service of the nearby multi, but it was nice to see a different side of it as well as an excellent hiding place.
TFTC!
I just spent a lightweight week in Rome with fellow members of Automattic‘s Team Fire.
Among our goals for the week was an attempt to strengthen the definition of who are team are, what we work on, and how and why we do so. That’s basically a team-level identity, mission, vision, and values, right?
Fellow Automattician Ben Dwyer recently wrote about his experience of using a deck of Dixit cards to help his team refine their values in a fun and engaging way. I own a Dixit set, so we decided to give it a go too.
Normally when you play Dixit, you select a card from your hand – each shows a unique piece of artwork – and try to describe it in a way that’s precise enough that some of the other players will later be able to pick it out of a line-up, but ambiguous enough that not all the other players will. It’s a delicate balancing act. Even when our old Geek Night was in full swing we didn’t used to play it often because our well-established group’s cornucopia of in-jokes and references made it trivially easy to “target” your descriptions at specific players1, but it’s still a solid icebreaker activity.
Perhaps it was the fantasy artwork that inspired us or maybe it just says something about how my team sees themselves, but what we came up with had a certain… swords-and-sorcery… even Dungeons & Dragons… feel to it.
Ou team’s new identity isn’t finalised, but I love the fact that we’ve been able to inject a bit of fun and whimsy into it. At our last draft, my team looks to be defined as comprising:
I think that’s pretty awesome.
This checkin to GC7FB9H From Canterbury to the cache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Well that was quite the adventure!
The first wayoint is right across the road from where some work colleagues and I are staying for an “away week”. I decided to dash out during a break in the weather to try and solve this multi between meetings. But I was quickly confused because… this isn’t the way I was taught to do Roman numerals. I’d always been told that you should never have four of the same letter in a row, e.g. you should say XIV, not XIIII. Once I’d worked out what I was doing wrong, though, I was okay!
The second and third waypoints had me braving some frankly scary roads. The drivers here just don’t seem to stop unless you’re super assertive when you step out!
Once I had the final numbers and ran it through geochecker I realised that the cache must be very close to where I’d had lunch earlier today! Once I got there it took me a while to get to the right floor, after which the hint made things pretty obvious.
Great trail, really loved it. And just barely made it back before the rain really started hammering down. TFTC, FP awarded, and greetings from Oxford, UK!
This checkin to GC9QCKH When in Rome live as the Romans do (bb Tribute 05) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Took until the fourth hiding place before I found the cache. Out for a walk with work colleagues on the way to dinner. Greetings from Oxfordshire, UK!
Now that travel for work is back on the menu, I’ve been trying to upgrade my “pack light” game.
I’ve been inspired in part by Beau, who I first met during my trip to South Africa in 2019 during my Automattic onboarding. Beau travelled from the US for a two week jaunt with nothing but hand luggage, and it blew my mind.
For my trip to Vienna earlier this year for a divisional meetup, I got by with just a backpack and a laptop bag. Right now, I’m waiting to fly to Rome for a week, and I’ve ditched the laptop bag in favour of just a single carry-on backpack. About 7kg of luggage, and well within the overhead locker size limit.
I’m absolutely sold on this approach. I get to:
As somebody who’s travelled “heavy” for most of my life – and especially since the children came along – it’s liberating to migrate to a “pick up a bag and go” mindset. To begin with, the nagging thought that I must’ve forgotten something essential was challenging, but I think I’ve gotten past that stage now.
Travelling light feels like carefree: like being a kid again, when all you needed was the back on your back and you were ready for an adventure. Once again, I’ve got a bag on my back3 and I know that everything I need for an adventure is right here with me4.
1 If you’ve travelled with me before, you might have noticed that I sometimes have trouble at borders on account of my damn stupid name, as predicted by the Passport Office. I’ve since learned all the requisite tricks to sidestep these problems, but that’s probably worthy of a post in its own right.
2 A little smart packing goes a long way. In the photo above, you might see my pre-prepared liquids bag in a side pocket, my laptop slides right out for separate scanning, my wallet and phone just dump out of my pockets, and I’m done.
3 I don’t really have a bag on my back right now. I’m sat in a depature lounge at Gatwick Airport. But you get the idea.
4 Do I really have everything I need? I’ve not brought a waterproof coat and, looking at the weather forecast at my destination, this might have been a mistake. But worst case I can buy a cheap poncho at the other end. That’s the kind of freedom that being an adult gets you, replacing the childlike freedom to get soaked and not care.
