Using some simple HTML, you can obfuscate an email address (or any other text) from a link on a web page. But when clicked, it will still work! It uses HTML data attributes to allow you to create your email address broken and then combine the pieces together when the user clicks the link. This should hide the email from unwanted visitors and bots. <a href="#" data-name="name" data-domain="yourdomain" data-tld="com" onclick="window.location.href = 'mailto:' + this.dataset.name + '@' + this.dataset.domain + '.' + this.dataset.tld; return false;">Text</a> I found this trick from this discussion.

My new home site is simple and is meant to be a sort of _business card_ for my online presence, which is pretty minimal. Today, I created a new home site, containing an index.html and style.css file that I hand-coded and published to GitHub. The site is hosted on Netlify, which pulls directly from my GitHub repository. I also added h-card support to the site, and it is validated on indiewebify.me. This format is intended as a standard way to present contact information on the web. It seems there is another standard at schema.org for adding “microdata” to your site. My understanding is that this is more useful for SEO. Furthermore, Google has its Rich Results Test that can be used to validate if your site or page qualifies for rich text in its search results. I don't think these are relevant to a simple personal blog, like my own, but I find them interesting. To experiment, I marked up my new home page with the schema.org syntax for a “person”, which Google would recognize as a valid profile page.

I spent my early career developing websites, and later business applications. I'd spend all day, nearly every day coding, and I loved it. Although, never considered myself to be a good developer. The part I was good at was the design of the application. My code was organized, reusable, consistent, and worked well. I was good at deciding what needed to be built, and how. Eventually, I became a senior developer, and eventually an architect. The unfortunate side effect of being an architect, is I can no longer write code all day long. I have many other responsibilities. In fact, writing code is a necessary luxury. I have to do it to keep up to date, but my real job is to provide estimates, documentation, code reviews, and direction to other developers. And the meetings, oh I love the meetings (not!). > "If a company’s most senior engineers just write code all day, the codebase will see the benefit of their skills, but the company will miss out on the things that only they can do. This kind of technical leadership needs to be part of the job description of the person doing it. It isn’t a distraction from the job: it is the job." (Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path) It's all good. I still love my job.

I wanted the ability to search my posts on my site, as I often use it to refer to previous posts that I've published. This capability makes the site more of a repository where I can know I can find previous content. I started with a search on Kagi to see if anyone posted instructions. I immediately found Robb Knights post, Using PageFind with Eleventy for Search. Bingo! I trust Robb's work, so it was a no-brainer. This approach uses Pagefind static site search library, which works with many static-site generators, including Eleventy. However, I did have some slight differences, probably because I'm configuring this for the first time on a newer version of Eleventy. I'm running Eleventy 3.0.0 with ESM. Thanks to Robb's post, and the PageFind documentation that helped me get through this. ## Install Pagefind * I opened Visual Studio Code to my workspace. * Run the `npm install --save-dev pagefind`. ## Tag posts to be indexed Next, we need to indicate to PageFind, which content we want to index. This is optional. I opened my `_includes/layouts/post.njk` template and in my `article` tag, added `data-pagefind-body`. Resulting in If PageFind sees content with the data-pagefind-body tag, it will only index that content and ignore anything else. ## Add the Pagefind search box Next, I added the default Pagefind search UI to my home page. * Open the `content/index.njk` file. * Above my content, added the following code. <div id="search" class="search"></div> <script src="/pagefind/pagefind-ui.js" onload="new PagefindUI({ element: '#search', showImages: false });"></script> ## Run Pagefind locally To test everything locally, run `npx -y pagefind --site _site` from the terminal. Change _site to the name of your output directory. This will create the `pagefind` directory with your output files. Run npx @11ty/eleventy --serve to view your site locally. If you added the Pagefind to you home page, it should show the search box. ## Run Pagefind Indexing Automatically To run Pagefind automatically every time I build my site, I opened my package.json file and under scripts, I updated my existing `build` to the following : `npx @11ty/eleventy && npx -y pagefind --site _site`. This should run the Pagefind index every time the site is built.

Yesterday, the family and I went to see The Wild Robot. It was an excellent movie. The girls cried (several times). I didn't (I'm not a crier), but they kept checking to see if I was. The movie was visually stunning, fun, and fast-paced. It is a kid's movie, but the story is very deep and adults will love it as well. My daughter thanked me for “making” her go see it.

Your Standing Desk Might Actually Be as Bad as Sitting All Day > The researchers found no association between time spent standing and the risk of cardiovascular disease, suggesting standing desks and similar work postures might not be enough to stave off the health problems associated with sitting around. > Not that sitting is much better either: beyond 10 hours of daily sitting time, every extra hour spent on your butt increased circulatory disease risk by 26 percent. I love my standing desk, and I swap between sitting and standing throughout the day. While standing may not make you healthier, sitting all day is definitely not good, and the standing offsets that.

This week, I had our internet changed over to a new Fiber connection that was added to our neighborhood a few months ago. I waited this long so I could allow enough time for my neighbors to test it out first. Of course, I couldn't only get faster internet coming into the home, I also “needed” to update our old equipment with the latest to be certain I could get reliable speeds everywhere in the house. After some research and even a test run of a Netgear Nighthawk router, I ended up with a TP-Link Deco Axe5400 mesh network. The Nighthawk didn't quite cover the house the way I expected. In the end, I'm getting pretty consistent results, over 1Gbps coming into the house, and over 500Mbps in my office, which is furthest from the router. Previously, I was getting around 100-200 Mbps download, 45 Mbps upload, and a higher ping. This is a pretty good improvement, considering I'm paying slightly less money than I was paying before.

I've been spending time this week, refactoring our Azure DevOps tenant. We have been using Azure DevOps at my company for as long as I can remember (well over 10 years?), and over time we've used it in different ways. We never had good governance, but would create projects and teams within projects as they come up. For the past several years, we've had one main project in Azure DevOps where we would create a team within the project for each of our actual projects. This allowed us to roll-up all our tasks to the main board, but resulted in us being locked into a single process type, iterations, and more. We would also have separate projects created for each repository we needed. I'm working on breaking away from the consolidated team and using DevOps how I think it was intended. One project per client. Within that project, we'll have teams for each major initiative (most projects only have one). All the repositories for that client are within that same project. This approach allows us to more easily manage team members, permissions, and each project can have its process. In other words, our simple projects can have a simple To Do, Doing, Done type approach, while our bigger projects can have additional states that give us more control. The separate projects will make it easier to have a single Wiki per client, as well as dashboards, control over sprints (when we use them), and much more. Overall, it's pretty easy to move tasks around. Create a query, select the tasks I want to move, right-click and move to project. But it does get tedious. I'm excited for it being done. Maybe a weekend project?

A few weeks ago, I retired my Apple Watch Series 7 and switched over to the Whoop band. I decided to do this because I was only using my Apple Watch for health reasons, and although the Health app captures a ton of data, it is pretty inconvenient to do anything with it without additional third-party apps. The Whoop subscription is pretty expensive, but my health should be worth it, right? What I like about the Whoop is that, in addition to all the great data it captures, the app actually provides useful insights and suggestions. For example, it will tell me based on my sleep what my strain goal should be that day. Sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's pretty low. It depends on how I feel. The goal is to meet the strain goal in order to at least maintain my fitness, and exceed it to improve fitness. When I start a workout, the app shows me exactly what my target is. I love it. The Whoop app also has some strength training included, which I want to try soon. Supposing, you can pick a prebuilt workout, or create your own, and it will track your reps and sets and tell you your muscle load. I'll try it out this week, and if I remember, share my results. I also like how Whoop provides you with weekly and monthly progress reports. The reports include how various habits, which you track in your daily journal in the app, impact your health. For example, reading for 30 minutes before going to sleep helps me sleep better, rather than 30 minutes of doom-scrolling on social media, does the opposite.

Award Winning Animated Short Film | Koji A really cool animated short film I found on YouTube. From Zero Linkin Park's new album is finally here! I've already listened to it all the way through a couple of times, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Emily Armstrong is a great singer and perfect for the next chapter of the band. Protocol Wars - The Fediverse Explained! A deep dive into what the Fediverse is, as well as discussions about Mastodon and Bluesky. Ping A free, minimal service that notifies you when your website goes down. Murmel Murmel is a service that provides you with a daily email digest containing the top news and stories from the people you follow on Mastodon. A 30-day trial and then $1.99 per month after. An In-Depth Tutorial of Webmentions + Eleventy I wanted to set assign this tutorial for later if I decide to add webmentions to my Eleventy site. Your Standing Desk Might Actually Be as Bad as Sitting All Day Yeah, this seems kind of obvious. But, having a standing desk you can raise and lower throughout the day appears to be ideal (for me).

Using some simple HTML, you can obfuscate an email address (or any other text) from a link on a web page. But when clicked, it will still work! It uses HTML data attributes to allow you to create your email address broken and then combine the pieces together when the user clicks the link. This should hide the email from unwanted visitors and bots. <a href="#" data-name="name" data-domain="yourdomain" data-tld="com" onclick="window.location.href = 'mailto:' + this.dataset.name + '@' + this.dataset.domain + '.' + this.dataset.tld; return false;">Text</a> I found this trick from this discussion.

I've been spending time this week, refactoring our Azure DevOps tenant. We have been using Azure DevOps at my company for as long as I can remember (well over 10 years?), and over time we've used it in different ways. We never had good governance, but would create projects and teams within projects as they come up. For the past several years, we've had one main project in Azure DevOps where we would create a team within the project for each of our actual projects. This allowed us to roll-up all our tasks to the main board, but resulted in us being locked into a single process type, iterations, and more. We would also have separate projects created for each repository we needed. I'm working on breaking away from the consolidated team and using DevOps how I think it was intended. One project per client. Within that project, we'll have teams for each major initiative (most projects only have one). All the repositories for that client are within that same project. This approach allows us to more easily manage team members, permissions, and each project can have its process. In other words, our simple projects can have a simple To Do, Doing, Done type approach, while our bigger projects can have additional states that give us more control. The separate projects will make it easier to have a single Wiki per client, as well as dashboards, control over sprints (when we use them), and much more. Overall, it's pretty easy to move tasks around. Create a query, select the tasks I want to move, right-click and move to project. But it does get tedious. I'm excited for it being done. Maybe a weekend project?

This week, I had our internet changed over to a new Fiber connection that was added to our neighborhood a few months ago. I waited this long so I could allow enough time for my neighbors to test it out first. Of course, I couldn't only get faster internet coming into the home, I also “needed” to update our old equipment with the latest to be certain I could get reliable speeds everywhere in the house. After some research and even a test run of a Netgear Nighthawk router, I ended up with a TP-Link Deco Axe5400 mesh network. The Nighthawk didn't quite cover the house the way I expected. In the end, I'm getting pretty consistent results, over 1Gbps coming into the house, and over 500Mbps in my office, which is furthest from the router. Previously, I was getting around 100-200 Mbps download, 45 Mbps upload, and a higher ping. This is a pretty good improvement, considering I'm paying slightly less money than I was paying before.

Your Standing Desk Might Actually Be as Bad as Sitting All Day > The researchers found no association between time spent standing and the risk of cardiovascular disease, suggesting standing desks and similar work postures might not be enough to stave off the health problems associated with sitting around. > Not that sitting is much better either: beyond 10 hours of daily sitting time, every extra hour spent on your butt increased circulatory disease risk by 26 percent. I love my standing desk, and I swap between sitting and standing throughout the day. While standing may not make you healthier, sitting all day is definitely not good, and the standing offsets that.

I finished reading Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The book is an expansion of Oliver's essays from his newsletter, The Imperfectionist. Yet, it doesn't flow like a series of separate essays, but rather they build upon one another. A few lessons stood out to me as they “hit the nail on the head” when it comes to my life. In the past, I've been the type to have a massive task list, where all of my tasks were neatly categorized and tagged with duration, context, start and due dates. In the end, I spent more time organizing my work rather than doing it. I grew out of this years ago, but I still remember the experience. Oliver talks about this in the book. > "The main point - though it took me years to realize it - is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it's part of any system or habit or routine." - Oliver Burkeman Oliver also recommends treating your task list as a source of things you could do, not have to do. > "Treat your to-do list as a menu. In the striving towards sanity mindset, a to-do list is always something you've got to get to the end of before you're allowed to relax. But in any context where there are more things that feel like they need doing than there's time available in which to do them — which is the normal state of affairs, after all — a to-do list is by definition really a menu, a list of asks to pick from, rather than to get through." - Oliver Burkeman He also gets into content curation. I've been caught in the trap of subscribing to a ton of content through RSS and newsletters, then to feel like I need to empty my list. The things I have not read haunt me. I've only recently overcome this, but still struggle with the FOMO. > "Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by." - Oliver Burkeman Oliver has some interesting things to say about decision-making and perfectionism. > "Perfectionists love to begin new endeavors, because the moment of starting belongs to the world of limitlessness: for as long as you haven't done any work on a project, it's still possible to believe that the end result might match the ideal your mind." - Oliver Burkeman The examples above are a few that stood out to me, but there are many, many more. Overall, the book is structured into 28 days, one lesson per day. Oliver recommends doing one lesson per day, and then let it resonate with you. Think about that lesson and how it applies to your life. Meditations for Mortals should be on everyone's bookshelf. It is full of advice about how to live life, knowing that we can't get everything done and do everything we want to do.

Last week, I switched from Microsoft Edge to Vivaldi. I've used Vivaldi before and think it's a great browser. I can't remember why I started using Microsoft Edge again. Probably because I use it for work and think it's a “fine” browser. Vivaldi had a big update this week that included a UI refresh, instant sync, and a new dashboard feature. I like the UI updates. If you don't, they give the option to switch back. I don't think I'll use the dashboard feature yet. I think we need more flexibility with the widget sizes, and I'd love to be able to add a clipped portion of a web page to my dashboard rather than the entire page. I also migrated my bookmarks from Raindrop into Vivaldi. If this sticks, I may drop my Raindrop subscription when it's due again. One less subscription, although I love Raindrop and highly recommend it. Bookmarks work well in Vivaldi and in especially like the nicknames feature, which makes it extremely fast to load any site. I also use the sidebar and split screen in Vivaldi a good deal. I'm not using email, RSS, and Calendar. I've been tempted to give it a try, but RSS is not available on the mobile app, which is where I do most of my reading.

A few updates that I've made to the Focustivity.blog site today. I added the Weekly Digest page. This allows visitors to subscribe to a weekly digest email, powered by Buttondown. This is literally an email digest of my posts from the previous week. No tracking, no spam, just a cool feature. I added analytics to the site, powered by Tinylytics. There is no tracking and not data stored about users. The purpose is to give me insights about what people are reading on my site, and more importantly, if there are broken links or redirects that need to be fixed. I'm on the fence with this one, but I added Kudos (powered by Tinylytics) to the posts. This allows readers to give posts a thumbs up. Finally, a few tiny styling tweaks.

I discovered the book The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper by Roland Allen from this newsletter post On Notebooks and Memory. It sounded like it would be something I'd like to read and based on the reviews, many were surprised about how good the book is. I'm not sure when I'll start it, but it's on my “to read” shelf.

I renewed my Micro.blog subscription today. Although I'm only using a portion of the services Micro.blog provides, I love the Micro.blog community and the work Manton and his team do with the platform. If you're not familiar with Micro.blog, it's essentially a blogging platform. Your blog can feature short “Micro” posts, as the name implies, but it's also great for long-form content. In addition to a blog (up to 5 if you go premium), you get bookmarks, private notes, a book management system, and you can even configure newsletters. It's a great deal! One of Micro.blog's core features is its tight integration with the Fediverse, which consists of services that communicate with each other using common protocols. This means you can easily repost your content to various services, like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads.

I was reading (again) The Memex Method by Cory Doctorow and found it inspirational for those who want to blog. > Like those family trip-logs, a web-log serves as more than an aide-memoire, a record that can be consulted at a later date. The very act of recording your actions and impressions is itself powerfully mnemonic, fixing the moment more durably in your memory so that it’s easier to recall in future, even if you never consult your notes. Blogging is an excuse to write out your thoughts that your future-self will appreciate. > These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I’ve salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration. The more we blog, the more connections we can make. > The availability of a deep, digital, searchable, published and public archive of my thoughts turns habits that would otherwise be time-wasters — or even harmful — into something valuable. And, the more history we create for ourselves, that we can reflect on.

I spent my early career developing websites, and later business applications. I'd spend all day, nearly every day coding, and I loved it. Although, never considered myself to be a good developer. The part I was good at was the design of the application. My code was organized, reusable, consistent, and worked well. I was good at deciding what needed to be built, and how. Eventually, I became a senior developer, and eventually an architect. The unfortunate side effect of being an architect, is I can no longer write code all day long. I have many other responsibilities. In fact, writing code is a necessary luxury. I have to do it to keep up to date, but my real job is to provide estimates, documentation, code reviews, and direction to other developers. And the meetings, oh I love the meetings (not!). > "If a company’s most senior engineers just write code all day, the codebase will see the benefit of their skills, but the company will miss out on the things that only they can do. This kind of technical leadership needs to be part of the job description of the person doing it. It isn’t a distraction from the job: it is the job." (Tanya Reilly, The Staff Engineer's Path) It's all good. I still love my job.

My new home site is simple and is meant to be a sort of _business card_ for my online presence, which is pretty minimal. Today, I created a new home site, containing an index.html and style.css file that I hand-coded and published to GitHub. The site is hosted on Netlify, which pulls directly from my GitHub repository. I also added h-card support to the site, and it is validated on indiewebify.me. This format is intended as a standard way to present contact information on the web. It seems there is another standard at schema.org for adding “microdata” to your site. My understanding is that this is more useful for SEO. Furthermore, Google has its Rich Results Test that can be used to validate if your site or page qualifies for rich text in its search results. I don't think these are relevant to a simple personal blog, like my own, but I find them interesting. To experiment, I marked up my new home page with the schema.org syntax for a “person”, which Google would recognize as a valid profile page.

Yesterday, the family and I went to see The Wild Robot. It was an excellent movie. The girls cried (several times). I didn't (I'm not a crier), but they kept checking to see if I was. The movie was visually stunning, fun, and fast-paced. It is a kid's movie, but the story is very deep and adults will love it as well. My daughter thanked me for “making” her go see it.

I wanted the ability to search my posts on my site, as I often use it to refer to previous posts that I've published. This capability makes the site more of a repository where I can know I can find previous content. I started with a search on Kagi to see if anyone posted instructions. I immediately found Robb Knights post, Using PageFind with Eleventy for Search. Bingo! I trust Robb's work, so it was a no-brainer. This approach uses Pagefind static site search library, which works with many static-site generators, including Eleventy. However, I did have some slight differences, probably because I'm configuring this for the first time on a newer version of Eleventy. I'm running Eleventy 3.0.0 with ESM. Thanks to Robb's post, and the PageFind documentation that helped me get through this. ## Install Pagefind * I opened Visual Studio Code to my workspace. * Run the `npm install --save-dev pagefind`. ## Tag posts to be indexed Next, we need to indicate to PageFind, which content we want to index. This is optional. I opened my `_includes/layouts/post.njk` template and in my `article` tag, added `data-pagefind-body`. Resulting in If PageFind sees content with the data-pagefind-body tag, it will only index that content and ignore anything else. ## Add the Pagefind search box Next, I added the default Pagefind search UI to my home page. * Open the `content/index.njk` file. * Above my content, added the following code. <div id="search" class="search"></div> <script src="/pagefind/pagefind-ui.js" onload="new PagefindUI({ element: '#search', showImages: false });"></script> ## Run Pagefind locally To test everything locally, run `npx -y pagefind --site _site` from the terminal. Change _site to the name of your output directory. This will create the `pagefind` directory with your output files. Run npx @11ty/eleventy --serve to view your site locally. If you added the Pagefind to you home page, it should show the search box. ## Run Pagefind Indexing Automatically To run Pagefind automatically every time I build my site, I opened my package.json file and under scripts, I updated my existing `build` to the following : `npx @11ty/eleventy && npx -y pagefind --site _site`. This should run the Pagefind index every time the site is built.

I finished reading Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. The book is an expansion of Oliver's essays from his newsletter, The Imperfectionist. Yet, it doesn't flow like a series of separate essays, but rather they build upon one another. A few lessons stood out to me as they “hit the nail on the head” when it comes to my life. In the past, I've been the type to have a massive task list, where all of my tasks were neatly categorized and tagged with duration, context, start and due dates. In the end, I spent more time organizing my work rather than doing it. I grew out of this years ago, but I still remember the experience. Oliver talks about this in the book. > "The main point - though it took me years to realize it - is to develop the willingness to just do something, here and now, as a one-off, regardless of whether it's part of any system or habit or routine." - Oliver Burkeman Oliver also recommends treating your task list as a source of things you could do, not have to do. > "Treat your to-do list as a menu. In the striving towards sanity mindset, a to-do list is always something you've got to get to the end of before you're allowed to relax. But in any context where there are more things that feel like they need doing than there's time available in which to do them — which is the normal state of affairs, after all — a to-do list is by definition really a menu, a list of asks to pick from, rather than to get through." - Oliver Burkeman He also gets into content curation. I've been caught in the trap of subscribing to a ton of content through RSS and newsletters, then to feel like I need to empty my list. The things I have not read haunt me. I've only recently overcome this, but still struggle with the FOMO. > "Treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by." - Oliver Burkeman Oliver has some interesting things to say about decision-making and perfectionism. > "Perfectionists love to begin new endeavors, because the moment of starting belongs to the world of limitlessness: for as long as you haven't done any work on a project, it's still possible to believe that the end result might match the ideal your mind." - Oliver Burkeman The examples above are a few that stood out to me, but there are many, many more. Overall, the book is structured into 28 days, one lesson per day. Oliver recommends doing one lesson per day, and then let it resonate with you. Think about that lesson and how it applies to your life. Meditations for Mortals should be on everyone's bookshelf. It is full of advice about how to live life, knowing that we can't get everything done and do everything we want to do.