Search

Have you noticed something a little bit different around here?

Welcome to the third version of theAdhocracy! It's been a long time coming, but the site has finally been rebuilt, rehosted, and re-just-about-everything else, so I figured I'd actually formalise the launch with a new post explaining what's happened and why.

An amalgamation of all the data you get fed at the end of a year. From Spotify Wrapped, to Google tracking, to my own beer journal, a look back over 2019 from a (mildly) data-centred viewpoint.

I mostly use my iPad for watching YouTube. So what do I do now that Google has locked my device out of the YouTube app because it's too old? Why is it possible for a company to effectively remove features from my device that worked yesterday?

In which I start off asking a simple question: what content categories should I use on this website? Four hours later, I've discoverd information gardening, now pages, digital-me libraries, and oh so much more. And yes, I think I've answered that first question. Fancy a trip down the rabbit hole?

Notes from my second fully remote conference, this time Sparkbox's UnConference. Being able to freely access talks from the US is a rare bonus of everything going on right now, and this did not disappoint. Musical cameos, great talks on UX, accessibility, design systems, and amazing speakers. Great event (despite the time difference).

It turns out that there are a lot of gotchas to creating a clear category structure for media reviews. Well, after a year of messing around with various setups behind the scenes, I think I'm starting to get somewhere.

A lot of blame is heaped on the near-mythical "algorithm", but is that really just an easy scapegoat for actual societal issues?

CraftCMS has a habit of imploding when running software updates, for which I have developed several coping strategies.

For the last month, I've been getting show-stopping errors in Craft. My web host couldn't find any faults, Craft support had no clue, and it only affected one machine: one with Bitdefender installed. I wonder...

How do you make your writing as accessible as possible? Plain text – a system of simplifying the words and phrases used to reduce overall complexity – is an "easy" solution, and I've never seen …

Animating a grid element provides a lot of potential for fancy UIs and interesting interactions, but it's not immediately obvious when searching online how it needs to work and what the limitations are.

Various notes from my battle to get a local development environment working for Craft CMS.

2023 was another BIG year in terms of, well, everything. We travelled all over the world. We attended scores of major events. And we got married. It's taken a while to write up, as a result!

What are my goals, themes, and overarching desires for the year ahead; and how does 2023 compare to what I had hoped it would become.

A look back over the twelve months that made up 2023, via the lens of the data captured about my life.

Astro and Netlify largely play well together, but I've found a few aspects of redirects and URL design that contain the odd foot-gun I had to work around.

Looking back over 2024, through the lens of the data I captured (or had captured about me).