Bytes of Michael Bishop

a personal web log

Archives

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I really loved this line Chris Coyier highlighted in his post about Bill Watterson’s The Mysteries.

“Working through differences toward a common purpose is practically an act of defiance these days.”

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There are a few options for archiving your tweets and Ben Balter has released a new project on GitHub—tweets. Pretty straight forward publishing on GH Pages.

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What a beautiful thing to say.

Free software offers free time, free life extension to many human living now and maybe in the future.

— Ploum

Read the full post The Gift of Time

Catching Up on RSS

My RSS consumption these days is using NetNewsWire synced through iCloud. I’ve always prefered reading my feeds on my laptop, probably because I’ve never picked up an iPad after having a 1st gen. But I also started reading RSS years before reading them anywhere but the desktop was an option.

I sort them oldest to newest and use the keyboard—I use arrow keys—to navigate through the list. I used to read everything in the app, but more recently as more folks are posting from their personal sites, I like to click over and read the longer posts in its native format. Especially web folks. It’s a great way to see what everyone is doing with their sites. View a little source.

NetNewsWire has the preference to open links in the background and the keyboard shortcut b will open the active item in the browser. That way, I can triage my feeds without suffering from inbox overload. I’d rather suffer from browser tab overload. At least that way when I need a diversion, I have a curated set of links ready to go.

From there I read the post and if it’s something I think I’d like to reference in the future, bookmark in Safari. Now that I’ve gotten the site back up, I might add bookmarks as a collection and start posting the meaty reference material here. Regardless I’ll be sharing links to stuff that stands out to me.

As I started typing this out I decided to go ahead and put my OPML file up on GitHub. I’ll try to keep it up to date. I’m not sure how useful it will be to anyone, but it’s there. I don’t delete feeds so there’s a lot in there for nostalgia’s sake.

What Happened to miklb?

Trying to retell how I started blogging is too long of a story, one I probably told on the old blog. Miklb’s Mindless Ramblings. It started out with WordPress, switched to Habari, then migrated to Jekyll, then back to WordPress before shutting it down last month.

The abbreviation of “Michael B” came as as result of limits on characters allowed in usernames and having a common name. But wanting something unique. When it came time to register a domain, combinations of michael and bishop were nonexistent in 2005. I settled on miklb.com, and it’s been my online identity ever since. But I wanted a fresh start. I had snagged michaelbishop.me a few years ago, and it was time to put it to use. But I languished in how I wanted to build the site and struggled with offline issues.

As to the handle “miklb”, I still have the Twitter account and GitHub account. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to shake it. Ironically I recently signed up for Letterboxd and couldn’t find a user name and guess what I settled on?

I have an archive of the content from there, and might go through it and repost anything that is still relevant. A lot is cruft about outdated technology that’s no longer relevant. I may just throw up a static snapshot on a subdmomain for posterity.

I’ll write up what I’m working on here in a follow up post. I’m also testing using a tag for “pinning” posts to the home page.

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11ty doesn’t have the concept of themes. I’m good with that. But what I’m considering, from a data portability standpoint as well as allowing work to the site to be separate from content is the concept of a theme. And making it easier for others to use it. Trick would be to get 11ty to read content from a directory outside of _src. Or to have a separate repo for the posts/content and _data as a submodule in _src.

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Having fun trying to figure out how to get a date for the note that I can generate a unique timestamp for. Created seems to build time. Trying git Created now. Note this is for Eleventy and a supplied value. I wrote a filter to convert the date to unixtime stamp for a permalink value for notes with no title.


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Will this timestamp filter work?

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So it begins the testing for using Brid.gy and webmentions. It’s been almost 5 years since I last set something up and while the underlying tech hasn’t changed, my memory on some of it has faded.


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There are many notes but this is the first one.


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Lasting Impressions

I have been yearning for several years to start creating some kind of physical art. I experimented with mixed media, namely newspaper headlines and paper making, but it didn’t scratch the itch.

Gyotoaku print of a sheepshead.

The past year I have been consumed by fishing. I want to be a small scale boat to table commercial fisherman and that has been a more difficult goal to achieve than it looked like on paper at the beginning of 2022. I also knew that there would be some seasonality to it with a lot of bad weather days mixed in. I wasn’t sure if that time would be filled with web consulting or making stuff.

I was familiar with fish printing in so much as I’d seen photos and maybe one video years ago. But in early October I started picturing them in my head, which always leads to a lot of searching on the web. I skimmed through a dozen or so YouTube videos and went to Walmart for some cheap supplies and dive in. Sketch paper and tissue paper, black acrylic paint and some cheap brushes.

My next attempts were a positive step forward. The ink seemed the problem so I switched from acrylic paint to traditional sumi ink. However with several attempts under my belt I went back and watched some more videos. That led to a journey around paper. Rice paper led to washi and now I’m on my third type of paper. I feel this will be a longer journey but the latest mulberry paper I ordered feels like I’m heading in the right direcetion.

My inspiration has been Dwight Huang. Watching someone approach the art from a natural and reverent place I felt a much stronger pull to explore the art.

And just to be clear, the only fish I’m printing so far[1] are ones I’ve caught that meet state regulations from a public pier. They all become dinner or bait, nothing is killed purely for the sake of making a print. That’s an important point to me. Dock to art to table.

  1. I hope to reach a level that allows me to print for others to have a print of a memorable catch. ↩︎

Hand Rolled

From my README.md

I’ve thought long and hard on how I want to make websites for me. This is where I’ve landed. Eleventy as a static site generator and PostCSS for styling development. I am borrowing heavily from work I’ve previously done with Jekyll-IndieWeb.

As I’ve narrowed things down publishing images is a big thing for me. I want semantic, responsive and accessible images. Looking at the tools available for Eleventy, no matter how I sliced it I didn’t like the options afforded me out of the box. I don’t have the javascript chops to whip up what I wanted. But after revisiting snippets in VS Code, it dawned on me that it would easier to create a couple of snippets to insert a <figure> with a <picture> element with placeholder text. I don’t expect to publish full articles on my phone, mostly notes and photos. At which point I believe I’d rather do um, art direction from the laptop cropping and processing images with Pixelmator Pro.

Bio

I was born in Tampa, Florida and but for a year in Denver (April 1992 - April 1993) and a season in Vero Beach (1994) it has been my home. My school age years were spent in the East Bay area (southern Hillsborough County—Gibsonton and points south). Before Denver it was Hyde Park; after Ybor. The natural migration for a Gen Xer back then was to Seminole Heights. I now live on the periphery of the historic district in a 1926 bungalow with a never ending list of repairs and projects. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Professionally I am web developer[sic], though I have a dream of being a small scale commercial fisherman doing local, sustainable boat to table seafood. Maybe even a fish shack doing smoked mullet and fish sandwiches. Which stems from my time working in indie restaurants. Busboy to server in my Hyde Park days. Starting in Denver, I moved to the kitchen where I stayed until going back to community college in my early 30s. Burned out but needing money while I started taking classes, I did a stint waiting tables at the Spaghetti Factory in Ybor. A master class in the turn and burn school of restaurants. I cobbled together a website for a restaurant I was the chef for circa 1999 and had a friend who moved to NY who sent me bootleg Photoshop discs for my iMac. I honed my skills making making message board sigs until I took a class on it in school. Another friend had a blog and I wanted in. Enter WordPress. Meanwhile, in school the classes available were teaching how to use Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver to build sites. Before I knew it I was getting paid to fix and build sites. That didn’t always pay the bills and sometimes I’d miss the kitchen. Working part time at the convention center, catering, stumbling into chef gigs. Meanwhile I was working remotely or freelancing on web stuff and deep into open source. Prior to the pandemic I took a developer role with a local marketing agency that was an absolutely eye opening experience. That doesn’t even cover half of it.

The one constant has been my struggle with my mental health. I was diagnosed with a Generalized Anxiety Disorder in 2000. I briefly attempted to try medication but I had a bad reaction to what was prescribed and lost insurance changing jobs. So it went unchecked until 2015. There’s a lot more to say about that than can fit in this supposedly short version of a bio.

Really, this web log is meant to be my autobiography.

Listening

Music, particularly live music, has been central in my life since my teens. Punk shows at the Cuban Club and hair bands at Lakeland Civic Center. In the nearly 40 years since, I'd guess I've seen 500 live shows give or take a dozen.

This section will focus on what I'm listening to now as well as tales of shows from the past.

Recently Played

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sometimes chef, sometimes web developer, always curious

tampa, fl

he/him