Oh hey, my name is Levi.

I remember years ago reading this article by Marcin Wichary about how they created custom link underlines at Medium using a lot of CSS trickery. I thought of it again when I was styling the links on my site and discovered all of the great link underline related CSS properties that have been well-supported since 2019! I'm not sure why, but I've totally missed all of these properties landing in browsers. Here's and example.

a {
  text-underline-offset: .25rem;
  text-decoration-thickness: .25rem;
  text-decoration-skip-ink: none;
  text-decoration-color: #666;
}

With just a few lines of CSS you creates some really nice-looking link underlines. It's a subtle design detail, but it can make the typography on your site look and feel much more refined. And as a bonus your links will still get a normal old underline if someone's browser doesn't support one of these properties. That's progressive enhancement, baby.

You can read in more detail about what all these properties do on MDN.

• text-underline-offset
• text-decoration-thickness
• text-decoration-skip-ink
• text-decoration-color

There have been a handful of times in the last few months when I was able to pinpoint some past event in my life based on when I wrote something completely unrelated down in a blog post or notebook. Blogging, or just writing in general, is really valuable in lots of ways, but I’ve never really thought of it as creating markers in time you can use to triangulate other events.

Write something down, post it at a URL, and you’ve got a reference point you can access whenever you need to from any device connected to the internet. That’s pretty cool.

So, happy new year! Here is my first marker in 2023.

I would like to start writing a monthly check-in post that I can aggregate into a feed for a new now page. I tried keeping a Now page a few years ago and it never really stuck, but I think treating is as a feed of short, focused posts might work a little better for me. I like the idea of having a unified feed where I can look back month-by-month on what I was working on, thinking about, etc.

Like a lot of other people, I have developed a pretty unhealthy (verging on toxic?) relationship with social media over the past 4-5 years. I started following a lot of journalists and political commentators during the lead up to the 2016 election and while I do think it is important to stay informed, I've learned that maybe Twitter isn't the most productive platform for me to do that on. I realize that I'm very privileged to be able to just tune out, but for the sake of my mental health, I need to find a more productive less rage-inducing way to engage.

Personal websites are cool

I've started to use my old Mastodon account that I created the last time I thought seriously about quitting Twitter in 2018. I'm really enjoying it over there. I wrote a post about that experience a little while back.

The mass exodus from Twitter has also rekindled my excitement for writing and working on my own site. I was already finishing up a redesign when all of the stuff with Twitter started happening, but the events of the past few weeks really lit a fire under me to finish it up. I've got a few new features I'm excited to add over the next few months like the new Now page I mention in the opening of this post.

Rapid fire status updates

• 🎚️ Home studio — I built a very basic recording set up so that I can start making demos at home. It's really fun, and I actually finished writing two new songs that I almost have demos finished for. It's the first time I've written any new music in almost 10 years.
• 🎸 Playing music — I've also been playing music pretty regularly with some of my friends. We rehearse once a week on Thursday nights. It feels good to be jamming regularly with other real humans. Right now we're working on some tracks with our friend Yuki that she wants to record in the spring. I'm having a blast!
• 🎨 Redesign and rebuilt my website — I made some space in the hero to use some of my own original artwork. It will be fun to work up new collages as/when I feel like it.
• ⚽ The World Cup in Qatar started this past weekend. I just watched the US v. Wales match. Team USA is looking great and, in my opinion, were totally on track to win it until the gave away a sloppy penalty late in the game. I'm excited to watch some more matches over the coming month.
• 🦃 We're hosting Thanksgiving this week. There's plenty of stuff to do before everyone comes over to our place on Thursday. I love cooking and I'm actually looking forward to hosting this year.

That's it until next time 👋.

The recent and unexpectedly fast implosion of Twitter made me realize that it's just not a place that I want to spend much more of my time. It seems to me like there are a lot of other folks that feel the same. I have been spending more time over on Mastodon and keep seeing some version of the same comment over and over—"Wow, this feels like the old, pre-corporate social media Web". I agree.

I built my first website in 2007. I was about to be laid off from my job at the time and needed an online portfolio fast so I could put it on my resume. I authored all of the static HTML and CSS by hand. After a couple weeks of work I ended up with a folder full of files that I dragged from my hard drive and dropped at the root of my new hosting account with a plain old FTP client. And that was it, I had a website! What a cool feeling.

I've had a lot of those same nostalgic feelings the past couple of weeks. It's got me fired up to put more energy into my personal site where I own all the content I create. For now, this is how I'm thinking about my relationship with the web and social media:

1. My personal site as home base—If I want to share a thought, maybe write a blog post instead
2. Mastodon for sharing and interaction with humans
3. RSS for keeping up with with other folks that are writing on their own sites

Honestly, I'm addicted to Twitter and it's probably going to take me a while to give it up completely, but I have spent considerably less time there in the last couple of weeks and I plan to keep that up. If you feel the same maybe grab my RSS feed and/or find me on Mastodon. ✌️

I've been running my site on static site generators (SSG) for a little over eight years now. First it was on Jekyll and later on Eleventy, which I'm still using today. I really enjoy the simplicity and performance benefits of static sites and building with SSGs is a great developer experience, in my opinion. However, lately I'm starting to feel a handful pain points that have me thinking about moving my site to different platform for content management.

• VSCode overload — I would like writing a blog post to be a totally separate experience from writing code. I know writing Markdown isn't the same as writing code, but it's in the same environment where I do a lot of my work during the day. I'd sort of prefer it not to be.
• Posting is a desktop/laptop only activity. I would love to be able to fire off posts from my phone while I'm sitting on the couch or in the car on a road trip. With a more traditional CMS it's generally easier to write and publish post on a mobile device since the admin UI is accessible in a web browser and most likely somewhat optimized for smaller screens.
• Static is great, until it isn't. I don't generally need to do much server-side stuff on my site, but when I do think about doing anything remotely dynamic, the amount of set up and cobbling services together required sometimes puts me off (see note about Webmentions below).

PHP is pretty good, actually.

I kind of miss having a server available by default. I was reading Matthias Ott's great article on personal websites this morning and in it they talk a bit about Webmentions and ways to go about adding them to a personal site. It got me thinking that I would love to add that capability to my site, but being a static, it would involve quite a bit more complexity. I'm not sure I have the appetite for that at the moment. With a PHP running on a server, it would be much more straightforward. Matthias even points out that sever popular CMSs have plugins that make it a pretty simple process.

Back to a CMS?

Kirby looks really great to me. It seems like there is a really healthy community built up around it and the Kirby team is doing a lot of good work to make it a long-term, sustainable product. I built a site for a client years ago using Kirby and it was a really wonderful experience. In the time since then it looks to me like it has a come a long way and has a ton of really great features out of the box. It allows you to have a folder full of flat files and write in markdown if you want to keep it super simple, but also comes with a really nice and customizable UI (The Panel) for managing and writing content. To me that sounds like the best of both worlds.

I think I'll sit with it for a while before I make a decision. I should probably just put all of the energy that it would take to move to a new platform into writing more posts anyway. 😅