Blogged Daily in January

Posted on February 1, 2021 by John F Croston III

In mid-December, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could write a blog post every day in January.

After looking at my blog, I noticed it had been almost two years since I last posted (late January 2019). Before that, I wrote one post in July 2018 and nothing in 2017.

Posting Daily

Posting every day allowed me to write a bunch at first about things from 2020 and the pandemic. Along with some things I wanted to say and others that came up.

Part of the issue was I tended to write longer posts with example code. Which needed to be coded semantically and accessibly, of course. So it took a long time to write them and then post them if I ever did. So I stopped for the most part.

Shorter Blog Posts

So I decided the posts would be short. In my mind, that meant 500 to 1,000 words. It seems most of the blog posts in January 2021 ended up being between 300 and 600 words on average.

The longest post was the first one on January 1st at 926 words. The shortest one was 197 words about a week ago.

What Were the Numbers

I went back and wrote down the number of words for each post in January. The total words I wrote were 14,789 for an average of 477 and some change per day.

NOTE – I only had to add all the words per day up three times to get totals to match twice.

It’s Tough Blogging Daily

After writing a post every day for a month now, I’m not sure how Austin Kleon and others find the time to post daily. Or have ideas most days. Occasion they skip a day or so. Either way, I have found it to be hard to do every day. It’s a lot of work to do it more than a few times a week.

Posting Weekly

After posting every day for a month, I found it took about an hour to two hours daily for each post. Some days three hours if I was working on more than one psst.

Meaning I would come up with an idea or two, outline them, maybe even write the first draft. Or the next day, finish the post and edit it. Then post it or if I was writing on the weekends or had the time started one for a few days in advance.

I think spending four or five hours a week writing a post or two would be good.

Doing so would give me eight or ten hours back. That I had been using to write, edit, and post for other things like time to read and learn to improve my skills. Say in JavaScript, CSS Grid, etc. Or maybe cooking, coding, relaxing, etc.

Or even spending time thinking about what I want to be when I group.

Snowy Sunday

Posted on January 31, 2021 by John F Croston III

With knowing it was going to be a snowy Sunday and nowhere to be. Besides my remote JavaScript Book Club at 5:00 PM, I didn’t set my alarm this morning or most Sundays.

Start of My Morning

I woke up at about 7:56 AM. laid in bed, and read until after 9:30 AM. Then I got out of bed to watch some cooking and farming videos on YouTube. I figured I could spend my lazy morning learning something.

Not Ready to Learn

I knew I wasn’t ready to learn JavaScript by watching my Wes Bos “JavaScript for Beginners’ videos. Maybe later this afternoon or this evening.

After watching videos, I cooked up a dozen breakfast sausages I had thawed out the last night. They had been in the freezer since the summer. I figure they would be getting a little freezer burn, etc., and they were.

Cooked Breakfast

While the sausages were cooking on medium-low heat, I washed dishes. Then I chopped the sausages into smaller bite-size pieces to make sure they’re cooked thoroughly. I then could use them in salads later, and with the four eggs, I was getting ready to scramble and cook for breakfast.

I toasted up some Wegman’s sliced garlic bread. Then I added strawberry preserves to one slice and apricot to the other. Once all that was done, I ate it while watching one more video.

Snow Shoveling

Then I got dressed to go out and shovel the sidewalk, walkways to each of the doors, and the back porch. With not having a car anymore, my shoveling is way down by many hours, depending on how much snow we get. I only had to make a path in the driveway.

Today was easy because we only got an inch and a half, maybe two inches at most.

Off for a Walk

After shoveling was done, I went for a 45-minute to an hour walk of over two and a half miles. I took my time to wander the neighborhood and see what was going on.

Home from Walk

Once I was back home, I cleaned up a few spots on the sidewalk and then went into the house. With being cold and a bit achy after shoveling I took a long hot shower. I know TMI.

Then I laid on my bed to read a bit on Twitter and see if I was ready for a nap, and I wasn’t.

Writing this Post

So I started writing this blog post after making a large bowl of popcorn on my stove with some oil and a little bacon fat. The bacon fat made for some tasty popcorn. I got myself a GT’s Gingerberry Kambucha and some water.

The next thing I do before a possible nap and book club is edit and post this blog post.

Then it’s outline/write a draft post about writing blog posts every day of January.

Possible Dinner Plans

Thinking dinner will be leftover curried coconut milk shrimp with elbow noodles, farro, corn, greens beans, and roasted Hatch Chili’s. Most likely, it will be a salad with greens that look to have seen better days.

More Lazy Weekends

So here’s to having more lazy Sundays or even weekends with not much to do but relax, read, nap, etc.

Your Website Needs Color and Contrast

Posted on January 29, 2021 by John F Croston III

NOTE – I found this old blog post in my drafts, so I did some time editing it, link checking, etc., and hit publish of an old draft.

To Read Your Content

To allow people to read your content, you need to make sure to have the color contrast as high as possible. So people can read what you have written. It shouldn’t be so high that it bothers people with low vision. Were too much contrast makes it difficult for them to read.

Putting light text on pastel or light backgrounds is not good for some people. You also have to think about the different types of color deficiencies (colorblindness). Meaning you don’t want to have red text on a green background, etc.

A Useful Tool

Below are a few different tools I use to check color contrast. The color contrast tool I use the most is Jonathan Snook’s web-based “Colour Contrast Tool”. It’s the tool I use to check color contrast for the development team at work or if I have chosen will work.

W3C Recommendation for Color Contrast

Here’s the W3C recommended values from the WCAG 2.0 – 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) Level AA.

Following these guidelines ensures that foreground and background color combinations provide enough contrast. This pertains to those with color deficiencies. To pass your text and background need to have a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 or higher to pass.

How High Should Your Color Contrast Be

You also have to think about how the web page or application is going to be used. Now, if it a heat index application that is likely going to be used outdoors. You have to consider most high heat index days will probably be in bright sunlight. So blaring sunny will not work well with a contrast ratio that passes b a little bit.

Color Deficiency or Colorblindness

Another tool is the “Color Oracle.” It’s used to simulate different types of colorblindness. They have Windows, Mac, and Linux versions created by Bernhard Jenny, Oregon State University (programming), Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, and Stamen Design, San Francisco (ideas, testing, and icon). The application places a color overlay for your entire main screen. You can set up different PF or function keys to turn on and off different types of colorblindness masks easily.

Doing this allows you to check against the three main types of color blindness. About 10% of the population is colorblind. Most of them are males. The three main types of color blindness are:

Deuteranopia or deuteranomaly (a form of red/green color deficit) – 7.5% of all males.
Protanopia or protanomaly (another form of red/green color deficit) – 2.5% of all males.
Tritanopia (a blue/yellow deficit- very rare) – Less than 0.3% of women and men.

More Tools

Next is the full list of tools I would you for building websites. Your choice will depend on how you work and what’s best for you.

Colour Contrast Tool – Jonathan Snook
Color Oracle
Accessibility Color Wheel – checks color contrast and the three different types of color blindness
10 Color Checkers – Roger Johansson

I hope these tools are helpful to you in checking for color contrast issues.

Additional Reading

For a more detailed look at color contrast, you need to read Todd Libby’s color contrast article called “Contrasting Accessibility with Color Contrast“. You should also follow him on Twitter at @ToddLibby.

Any Recommendations

If you have any other tools that you use and think I should checkout, please leave a comment, and I will give them a look.

How I’m Using GitHub

Posted on January 28, 2021 by John F Croston III

I have had a GitHub account since March 6, 2013, but I never used it until much later in 2016.

I started working on a list of places to eat when I traveled and using GitHub to backup/store my code.

First GitHub Use

My first use of GitHub was on September 30, 2016, when I created my first repro for the place to eat project. At some point, I purchased the domain name GottaEatHere.com to put the information on. I bought a bunch more domains because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to call the application.

Reason for Using GitHub

The reason I started the project was for the An Event Apart and Microsoft 10K Apart contest. Besides, people had been asking me for recommendations of where to eat. So I figured I build a small web-based application to kills two birds with one stone. The contest was where people had to build an application in less than 10 kilobytes (KB) of code.

I spent some time upfront figuring out how best to do that. I wanted to learn PHP or at least get better at it, so that’s where I started.

Planning the Application

My first thoughts were I would need two or three Kb for CSS. Then another three Kb for my HTML template, and the remaining Kb for logic to render the pages content.

I decided to use JSON files because I wasn’t sure if a database would count against the total of 10 Kb. Which allowed me to learn something else new too.

I worked to get my PHP application to render a list of five or six cities, and I think five restaurants I loved going to. Each city had its know JSON file, and they were half Kb in size or something like that.

The 10 Kb or less version of the application had a lot less information per city and restaurant. I think it had a name, address, phone number, URL, and a short description. Now it has a bunch o other information.

A person chooses a city was from a drop-down list. Then the PHP would read the JSON file for the city that a person picked. Then render the restaurants for that city. Nothing fancy, but it got the job done. I didn’t expect to win anything, and I didn’t.

Of course, the whole time, I was making sure it was as accessible as possible.

Using GitHub Daily

On November 18, 2016, I started making more commits to add more places to eat along with more cities, along with information.

November 18th was the day I started making at least one commit or added an issue to GitHub every day. It might have been for new fields, cities, states, etc., to GitHub every day.

Over the last four and a half or so years, I have only missed doing something on GitHub about a dozen times. So that works out to three or four times a year. I’m okay with that and don’t lose sleep over it if I do. Some of the updates and issues were related to my slides, and others were for code examples for the slides.

My use of GitHub is still through their desktop application. It lets me create new repro’s, create issues for new features, cites, restaurants, etc.

With only me working on the projects, I have not had to worry about creating branches, merging others’ code, etc. At some point, I need to learn how to do that through the application or the command line.

Need to Learn More Git

So here’s to learning more Git. Be it through the GitHub application or, more importantly, through the command line.