Posts from March 2020

If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to get static.  I’m thinking here of sites for places like health departments (and pretty much all government services), hospitals and clinics, utility services, food delivery and ordering, and I’m sure there are more that haven’t occurred to me.  As much as you possibly can, get it down to static HTML and CSS and maybe a tiny bit of enhancing JS, and pare away every byte you can.

Because too many sites are already crashing because their CMSes can’t keep up with the traffic surges.  And too many sites are using dynamic frameworks that drain mobile batteries and shut out people with older browsers.  That’s annoying and counter-productive in the best of times, but right now, it’s unacceptable.  This is not the time for “well, this is as performant as our stack gets, so I guess users will have to live with it”.  Performance isn’t just something to aspire to any more.  Right now, in some situations, performance could literally be life-saving to a user, or their family.

We’re in this to serve our users.  The best service you can render at this moment is to make sure they can use your site or service, not get 502/Bad Gateway or a two-minute 20%-battery-drain page render.  Everything should take several back seats to this effort.

I can’t tell you how best to get static — only you can figure that out.  Maybe for you, getting static means using very aggressive server caching and a cache-buster approach to updating info.  Maybe it means using some kind of static-render plugin for your CMS.  Maybe is means accelerating a planned migration to a static-site CMS like Jekyll or Eleventy or Grav.  Maybe it means saving pages as HTML from your browser and hand-assembling a static copy of your site for now.  There are a lot of ways to do this, but whatever way you choose, do it now.

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Addendum: following are a few resources that can help. Please suggest more in the comments!

• Emergency Site Kit: “This project aims to enable people to quickly publish a simple website that can withstand large amounts of traffic and will work even under extreme conditions. It is built on the rule of least power, using simple technologies for maximum resilience.”
• FastCGI Cache for Nginx.
• Sitesauce is offering free accounts for critical sites impacted by the pandemic.

• Get Static was published on Sunday, March 22nd, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Commentary and Web categories.
• There have been seventeen replies.

I’ve been working from home for (checks watch) almost 19 years now, and I’d love to share some tips with you all on how to make it work for you.

Except I can’t, because this has been incredibly disruptive for me.  See, my home is usually otherwise empty during the day — spouse at work, kids at school — which means I can crank up the beats and swear to my heart’s content at my code typos.  Now, not only do I have to wear headphones and monitor my language when I work, I also am surrounded by office-mates who basically play video games and watch cat videos all day, except for those times when I really get focused on a task, when they magically sense it’s the perfect time to come ask me random questions that could have waited, derailing my focus and putting me back at square one.

Which, to most of you used to working in an office setting, I suppose might seem vaguely familiar.  I’m not used to it at all.

Here’s what I can tell you: if you’re having trouble focusing on work, or anything else, it’s not that you’re terrible at working from home or bad at your job.  It’s that you’re doing this in a set of circumstances completely unprecedented in our lifetimes.  It’s that you’re doing this while worried not only about keeping yourself and your loved ones safe from a global pandemic, but probably also worried about your continued employment — not because you’re doing badly, but because the economy is on the verge of freezing up completely.  No spending means no business income means no salaries means no money to spend.

We can hope for society-level measures to unjam the economic engine, debt leniency or zero-interest loans or Universal Basic Income or what have you, but until those measures exist and begin to work together, we’re all stumbling scared in a pitch-black forest.  Take it from someone who has been engulfed by overwhelming, frightening, pitiless circumstances before: Work can be a respite, but it’s hard to sustain that retreat.  It’s hard to motivate yourself to even think about work, let alone do a good job.

Be forgiving of yourself.  Give yourself time and space to process the fear, to work through it and you.  Find a place for yourself in relation to it, so that you can exist beside it without it always disrupting your thoughts.  That’s the only way I know to free up any mental resources to try to do good work.  It also puts you in a place where you can act with some semblance of reason, instead of purely from fear.

Stay safe, friends.  We have a long, unknown road ahead.  Adjustment will be a long time in coming.  Support each other as much as you can.  Community is, in the end, the most resilient and replenishing force we have.

• Trying to Work From Home was published on Wednesday, March 18th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Commentary and Work categories.
• There has been one reply.

Six years ago, we participated in our first St. Baldrick’s event.  Carolyn was preparing to shave her head to support Rebecca, who was still very much alive and, we thought, cancer-free.  And Joshua, the little brother at just over three years old, had apparently decided to do the same to his head, although he didn’t tell us until the day of the event.

This year, Joshua will be participating in St. Baldrick’s for the seventh time in a row, shaving his head to raise money for and awareness of the campaign to cure cancers in memory of his sister at the Cleveland Heights event on Sunday, March 15th.  He’s been letting his hair grow all year for maximum payoff: literally, he has not had a single hair cut since last year’s St. Baldrick’s event.  He also recently had Carolyn dye it blue, which means he’s giving off a strong JRPG vibe.  (He rolls his eyes whenever I mention this.)

This being his seventh year, Joshua will officially become a Knight of the Bald Table.  In his honor, I will be his squire for the day — which means I will be shaving my head as well, for the first time.

If you can, please support Joshua’s knighting shave by supporting his fundraising efforts.  He’s set an ambitious goal, but I’m pretty sure that working together, we can well exceed it.  You can do it in honor of him, or in honor of his sister, or both; but please, if you can give him a boost, please do so.  Any amount will help, as will spreading the word on les médias sociaux.  Thank you.

• Sir Joshua Meyer was published on Thursday, March 5th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Joshua category.
• There have been no replies.

Back in 2011, I decided to make a timeline out of CSS modules’ version histories, where “version history” means “a list of all the various drafts that were published”.  I updated the data every now and again, and then kind of let it go dormant for a few years.

Until this past weekend, when for no clear reason I decided what the hell, it’s time for a refresh.  So I trawled through all the specs’ version histories to get the stuff I didn’t have, and gave the presentation a bit of an upgrade.  The overall look and feel is pretty consistent, except now, thanks to repeating linear gradients, I have vertical stripes to show each year in the now 21-year-long timeline.  I put labels up at the top of the stripes, and figured they should remain visible no matter where you scroll, so I set them to position: sticky.  Then I realized most people would have to scroll horizontally, so I made the specification names sticky as well.

So now, no matter where you scroll on the page, you’ll see the specifications along the left and the years along the top.  The layout isn’t mobile-hostile, exactly, but it isn’t RWD-ized either.  I’m not really sure how I could make this fully responsive, except maybe to just drop the timeline layout altogether and revert to the lists that underlie the layout.

While I was at it, I converted a fair bit of the CSS to use var() and calc() so that I could set a column width in one place, and sprinkled in just a tiny bit more PHP to output offset values in a couple of places.  Nothing major, just quality-of-life upgrades for the maintainer, which is to say, me.

I bring all this up for two reasons.  One, I like the presentation upgrades, and wanted to share.  Two, by sheer coincidence, today the CSS Working Group published first versions of four CSS modules:

• CSS Color Module Level 5
• Media Queries Level 5
• CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 4
• CSS Transforms Module Level 2

So I’ve added them to the timeline, along with CSS Color Module Level 4, which I’d overlooked in my weekend update.  These are the first module versions of 2020, so enjoy!

I do find it a little weird that Color Level 5 is out when Color Level 4 has never left Working Draft status, but maybe Level 4 is about to graduate, and this just happened to come out first.  We’ll see!

• CSS Specification Timelines, Updated and Modernized was published on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020.
• It was assigned to the CSS, Standards, and W3C categories.
• There has been one reply.