Week Notes #4

These are some notes about my working week. There are rules that I break trying to write them.


This week I’ve been thinking about how to tighten up my process for developing websites and I wondered how I might tidy up all those little itchy problems that irk me on a daily basis.

So I stumbled over the Pesticide Chrome extension by mrmrs, which is super handy for figuring out weird layout bugs visually. I’m not going to include it in a project’s CSS because I think that would probably make things quite confusing, but as an independent browser plugin it’s bound to be extraordinarily useful.

On a similar note I’ve realised that OSX’s Finder is a terrible way to navigate files and folders. This encouraged me to spend a portion of the week dedicated to writing custom Alfred 2 workflows. The first allows me to type ‘w’ followed by the name of a post and Alfred will fetch that file from Dropbox and open it in Writer. That doesn’t sound like a big deal but when you’re opening and closing posts whilst navigating the broken UI of the Finder all day it becomes a life saver. Likewise I’ve done the same for Sublime Text, where I can simply type sb and the name of a directory in the Projects folder. This will then open that project in the sidebar of a new Sublime window. It’s sure to save me a lot of typing and mouse-clicking.

Noteworthy listens

  • Sleater-Kinney meets Bob’s Burgers is now my classic go-to tune for some butt-shaking time.
  • The new José González album Vestiges & Claws has certainly been on repeat, too.
  • Thanks to a suggestion from Charlotte I returned to an incredible episode from 99% Invisible that I missed called Wild Ones Live (it’s the sort of episode where you’ll end up using all the emojis to describe it.)

Reading, browsing, surfing

I’ve been preoccupied with a lot of other things this week so reading has taken a side note for the time being, although I did churn through The Sculptor by Scott McCloud in a single evening.

Oh and Indra Kupferschmid wrote a post called Typography on the web and I loved every bit of it. She writes:

Typography hits us on two different levels: by the look of it, telling us if this is something we may like or should be interested in, and by the necessity to read it. If we have to read this time table, contract or assembling instruction we will do so regardless of its looks. We may find it more or less comfortable to read but our brains are incredibly capable of deciphering the most cryptic glyphs in context.