a few misc items

[brainwane]

I found a few useful tools you might also like!

Heidi Waterhouse suggested that wearing a little color on one's lips might be helpful in emphasizing contrast in online videos: "You don’t need to wear dramatic lipstick, but I find that when I wear something on my lips I remember to smile more in meetings and therefore am more engaged." I bought a lip gloss (my first?) and a few tinted lip balms online, and am trying wearing them.

I'm probably moving my main blog away from the old software I've been using and I'm open to suggestions. Ha - as I was drafting this DW post, a man has already disregarded or missed my "If you reply to me to give advice on what platform I should choose but you have not read this bullet point, I will disregard your advice and probably decrease my interest in your advice in the future." item and given me useless advice! Happy that I added that to catch them out.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

I was given the same advice lip-color advice when I was first certified as a baby ASL interpreter. I'll admit that it never stopped feeling weird to wear lip color -- I'm just not that femme -- but I was happy to be more effective for my clients.

Your useless advice filter radiates sheer brilliance!

I'm gobsmacked by the functionality offered by diagrams.net period, much less for free.

[sporky_rat]

As someone who lip reads, yeah, color is super helpful in reading. (One male ASL teacher I know wears a brown color when he's teaching via video, he says it's definitely gotten easier to find less femme colors these days.)

[watersword]

This is not advice, since I keep meaning to investigate setting up a flat-file website, but every time I try (candidates so far have included Hugo, Ghost, and Eleventy), I start losing my mind in short order, so I'll be interested to see what you pick!

(Since the day job involves Drupal, the prospect of using it for my own stuff makes me want to shriek endlessly into the uncaring void, although I could probably get one up and running relatively easily. But I will not do that to myself.)

This is a total cobbler's children go barefoot thing, I think.

[momijizukamori]

I rather reckon Flask and Django might not be what you're looking for - I love them both (particularly Flask, I use Flask for anything and everything webapp-wise), but they are frameworks on which one could write blogging software rather than blogging software themselves (Django provides some out of the box admin pages for models, but it's not much). That said it's possible people have built platforms on top of them I don't know about? If I were doing a blog these days I'd probably roll my own system on Flask.

Drupal needs less configuration to turn into blogging software but has a history of security issues and my personal experience is that trying to get data out of a Drupal instance into something new is a HUGE pain in the ass because it uses a billion intermediary tables to link data. I wouldn't touch it again myself but there are probably lots of people you can hire to do setup/theming.

When I still kept a separate blog I was fond of Moveable Type but tragically it looks like the last few versions are closed-source - you might be able to find the open source code for MT5 around though and it probably still runs; Perl and Apache haven't changed a whole lot in the last ten years.

And I have heard good things about Hugo.

[ckd]

I rather reckon that's a clever use of the "brown M&M's clause" approach.