normally i have 3 days off work each week, but due to the snow my days got pushed forward last week so i only had two days off in a row.
we spent one of those days out & about, meeting some family for lunch, visiting a friend, going to some thrift stores. the rest of my time was pretty much spent working on my website (again!)
i made a new template so i can quickly create nice looking pages for events, and the event data will also show up on my homepage and /now page. i made pages for two events that i have coming up, and added the template to my frontmatter editing tool so i can actually remember what fields to input (unlike most of my website pages, they have a lot of variables in the frontmatter and very little "body" content. the editing tool serves as documentation when i'm making new pages, because it has form inputs for all those variables.)
once i finished that up, i also did a couple of speed/bandwidth optimizations. i noticed that the new version of mobile safari broke mobile menu design (shakes fist at cloud) so i fixed that. instead of having a crazy javascript/svg filter animation, i made the same motion graphic as an animated gif. i also remade something i was using css blend modes for as an image with alpha. normally those would be a .gif and a .png respectively, but i also finally caved and made all of the images on my site output as .webp, which supports transparency and animation but has much better file sizes. i mostly did that to fix some of my tarot card images (some of those images were 2-7 megabytes each, oops). it definitely improved overall speed, at the expense of some backwards compatibility. perhaps someday i will think about further optimizations (variable resolution images with <figure>? fallback formats?) but i think it is already a bit of an improvement.
now i'm back at work. today, i was doing some tutorials to learn grasshopper, the procedural design plugin for rhino. at the end of the day, i was able to vastly improve one of our existing patches that was created like, a decade ago, so it computes 90% faster. that made me excited. optimizations all around, at home and work! hopefully i can figure out more cool stuff in the next few days while we have more in-between-things time.
photo kind of unrelated; it's the interior of a washing machine.
