Scratchpad

This is where
The address would go
In a real
Letter

11th April 2022, 07:52

Dear friends,

This is a letter. It has writing in it written by me to be read by you. If you're reading this: it worked. Well done both of us.

Well, that's all I have to say for this letter. Thanks for reading.

All the best,
peesee

Pee Ess!
In the process of testing the page - and moving my freshly-minted style code from inline inside the DIV tag into its new home in my style.css stylesheet - I found that I had to force-refresh the bloomin' style.css file before the page would display correctly. What?! I guess I get that webpages sometimes need to be force refreshed, and that a browser probably shouldn't call on style.css every time... But come on, now. Anyway: lesson learned.

This is where
The address would go
In a real
Letter

11th April 2022, 18:20

Dear friends,

This is a whole 'nother letter! Clever, no? Just a few lines of HTML to repeat and then I can enter new letters onto this page.

But wait a minute... This letter was written after the one above. And that's fine, except... Do we want a long chronological list, nay - pile? - of letters? Or are we going for a blog-type layout, reverse chronological, with the newest at the top?

Hmm...

Yours thoughtfully,
peesee

Address
Block
Here

12th April 2022, 10:54

Dear friends,

This is a test uploading a new letter entirely from within VS Code (running in the Linux subsystem ony my Chromebook) and using the neocities CLI interface.

Here goes...

Wish me luck!
peesee

Address
Goes
Right
Here

12th April 2022, 11:00

Dear friends,

Oh my GOODNESS, it actually worked! Pushing files from the command line... worked! I made the edits to the local file, then pushed it via the command line (neocities push .) and it worked!

Flushed with this newfound skill, I've just downloaded nano and I'm editing this letter here instead of VS Code. Because why learnt to walk when you can run? And then trip over, smashing all your beautiful teeth in....

Anyway. More to come. I have some structural ideas for this page and I want to get those all sown up first. But we're making progress... It's exciting!

Yours hopefully,
peesee

Address
Goes
Right
Here

12th April 2022, 14:12

Dear friends,

Well, now. Not only have I sussed out uploading files using neocities' command line functions, but I've managed to add a 'typewriter' font, which I love, and a subtle(???) box-shadow and hover effect, hopefully making my letters look like sheets of paper. I love it so far. It's getting so close to what I had in my head.

Even if I drop all of this in a few days, I'll still be so satisfied with what I've achieved here. It's not taken long, and it's been a combination of coming up with a concept, googling how to do it, borrowing code and tweaking it until it does what I want, and doing all this using a tool and environment that's both new and familiar to me. It's great.

Thanks for your patience and I hope you're enjoying the ride.

Your pal,
peesee

Address
Goes
Right
Here

13th April 2022, 07:40

Good morning friends,

One thing I want to ensure is that these letters look like, well, letters as much as possible.

I like letters. They're containers, really. They present their contents in a predictable fashion. (They also enable me to write them as letters - and hopefully for you to read them as such, too - which I think helps us both.)

One little tweak I've made to try and preserve their letteriness is a wider margin on the page. Typed letters tend to have a decent amount of white space around the edges, so I've tried to set that for these.

My next challenge is handling responsive design - making the letters grow and shrink with the size of the window, and making sure that the proportions of the font and the sheet of paper itself respond accordingly. Otherwise they'll look strange on a phone's tall and narrow screen, rather than still presenting as a letter.

A couple of challenges here, then: first, letters are normally on a tall sheet of paper like A4, A5, or the mysterious American 'letter'. And second, if I want the letter to scale as a letter, the text should scale a little with it. But I need to make sure it's not too small to read on a phone. So I may need to come up with some ground rules, like character limits. This approach actually appeals, becaue if I was writing on a typewriter on a fixed-width piece of paper, using a fixed-width font, I would have a hard character limit. So I just need to come up with a comfortable one for multiple screen widths. Maybe like A5, or that weird, almost square format that letter-writers in the past used...

Anyway. That should give me something to focus on. I had briefly considered setting the aspect ratio of the .letter 'container', but the problem with doing this is it forces a page length limit and would mean establishing a way to 'flow' text from one to another after a set number of characters. Fine on some desktop publishing software, but perhaps a little beyond me and my HTML skills for this little project...

Have a great day,
peessee

Address
Goes
Right
Here

13th April 2022, 19:09

Dear pals,

This is a little off-topic, but Placebo put out a new record recently, following a very strong return to form with an EP that was either their first in a long while, or the first that made it onto my radar.

The new album is really good. It's almost certainly something of a nostalgia trip, but I've been really enjoying it. I'm now listening to their 2000(!) album Black Market Music, which I fondly remember coming out and being very excited about. It still sounds good today. Big and lush, and with subversive lyrics and themes. Just like the new album, satisfyijngly.

I've written before (and thought much more) about how one should enjoy music these days. What formats, platforms and processes. Crucially: how best to remunerate an artist. Some bands are small enough that buying something directly off them via Bandcamp makes sense as they'll see those pennies come straight into their account (particularly when purchased on 'Bandcamp Friday').

But for bigger acts, what's the next step up? Any music I don't buy on Bandcamp I consume on Spotify. That's a problematic platform but it's become the way I listen to music, and it's come massively to the exclusion of my actually buying much music. There are a handful of releases I pick up on Bandcamp, but they're in a tiny minority. Everything else is Spotify.

At a band like Placebo's level, is this suitable? They're a band I'm so glad exist, and especially that they can still exist. Is the band rich enough to retire early and just record music when they want to? Maybe. But probably not. So how are they best supported. Buying tickets? Merch? Vinyl purchases surely don't give them a heck of a lot of income as the format itself is so expensive. And yet they're surely bigger than a Kickstarter or a Bandcamp purchase. (I haven't checked, but by and large, 'big' releases aren't on Bandcamp, presumably as it would just mean having to employ an intern to run that one, specific, niche way of selling their music.)

So I'm not sure. What else can I offer? My support? I'll excitedly tell my friends about the new Placebo record and then... What? They go on and buy something, or play some streams on Spotify, or maybe go and see them on tour?

It's late on a long day. I don't have the answers. I just wanted to jot down some slightly frustrated thoughts... While at the same time rejoicing that Placebo, in the year of our lord 2022, have new music out - and it sounds great.

Yours with black painted nails,
peesee

Address
Goes
Right
Here

20th April 2022, 07:11

Dear friends

A week has passed since my last note - my excuse is we've had a long weekend for Easter. This meant lots of nice things like food, drink, and little satisfying jobs around the house and garden. The good weather also meant time spent outdoors, and that included a long walk along the coast, and a bike ride to Parkrun. All in all a rather active long weekend.

Naturally it means I haven't done much on this new design. But I've thought about it from time to time. I re-read some static site generator tutorials to see if that's what I want to do.

Part of me feels like just building a site using only what I know already - or what I have known since about 2010 (and more realistically what I have known since about 2002). It's familiar. It's just enough to get along with and achieve what I want. And it's nostalgic and cosy and 'fine'.

But another part of me thinks I should use this opportunity - this burst of enthusiasm - as fuel to learn more, and to expand my knowledge into how things can be done today. So that's things like using static site generators, rather than standalone pages that I must update with find and replace. Hmm.

Some things to consider, then. I also need to make sure that while I do use this as an opportunity to learn and to build, that I do also use it to do THIS - write down my thoughts. After all, that's the whole point in wanting to make a site like this, particularly using the letter format.

I get lost in signals and signs all the time. Am always hunting in the white noise for the signals. Perhaps that's just human nature? Identifying things and learning enough to pick them out.

But really: birdsong, stars, species of trees and other flora, radio signals, niche websites... I'm just constantly finding a field to be interested in (sometimes a literal field, lol!), and then trying to figure out how to learn more to identify things within it.

Ramble ramble. Someone's had their coffee this morning haven't they? Over and out.

Talk to you later, perhaps,
peesee

Address
Goes
Right
Here

20th April 2022, 17:49

Hello friends,

Sigh. I'm looking into Hugo and Eleventy as static site generators to tinker with. I briefly played with the latter in 2020 when I was last trying to get my head around them. I think on paper they are what I need to be using. But it all comes apart when I try and learn all the new sub-parts that I need to get my head around to make it all work.

One new function, technology or command would be okay, I think - but having to suss out a few different things all at once is a bit much.

On the brighter side of things, I continue to learn new things about all this sort of nonsense.

I was following a tutorial for something adjacent to all this, and it quietly mentioned opening a new terminal window to enter a command. Holy shit. Mind blown. I had NO IDEA you could open a second terminal window. Well, maybe I did... I do recall seeing you could have separate tabs in the terminal on Chrome OS... But it never occurred to me - even when running 'top' to check resource usage, when I wondered how I was meant to do anything else in the terminal while this fullscreen app was running. Silly me. It's almost as though you can multitask in Linux...

Anyway. Learning new stuff is fun. I just find it easier learning it in small, chewable chunks.

That's all for now. I'm going to watch some tutorial videos and see if anything else sticks better that way.

Ta-ra,
peesee