Random list of things to share

I just want to create a collection of updates to share as I every now and then go back to tinkering with my website and make changes based on things I encounter online or just things I figured I could work on now. Also kinda inspired by things like Jarrod Blundy's 7 Things This Week or other similar blog post types.

1. Mainly the reason why I decided to type this out—I stumbled upon this article by Rishikesh Sreehari entitled “Why and How I Version My Blog” and figured I’d update how that’s listed in my package.json file. Ever since I started running my blog on 11ty from a forked version of the time when I started it, I’ve been slightly bothered seeing the version be shown as chisenires.design@1.0.0 when I try to build my website locally all the time. I was thinking of how else I could “version” my site, but I guess… I can try this one out and see how it goes? It’s going to be very manual in the beginning but maybe I’ll eventually figure out some automation to help me update this haha

   An update to this: might just drop this for now since I’ve concluded that having a version tied to my personal blog or website feels more ridiculous the more I think about it 😆 I’ll just re-add it again once it makes more sense. But for now, I’ll keep things simple 😊

2. While thinking whether I’d make this a consistent thing or not (and as I searched the web for the link back to Jarrod’s website since this is mainly where I saw this format from) I thought of a way to name this “thing” I’m gonna start here: 8to, which is a Taglish^[1] play on words, with eight for me planning to share around 8 random things and ito as… it in Tagalog 😆 For now I’ll keep the tag set and hopefully I remember this next time I think about doing this 😁 (Today’s also a Tuesday, the most randomest of days… I wonder if I’ll get the itch to edit my site again on a Tuesday?)
3. I have sooooooooo many saved Tabs on my personal Zen Browser that I have yet to go through. I feel a bit guilty not going thru most of them. To make up for it, I’ll share one article that I have gone through, albeit skimmed a bit: Stéphanie Walter’s blog post titled “Enterprise UX: essential sources to design complex data tables”, which I went through because I was trying to look for sources of inspiration on how to style tables for a thing at work. I ended up with more opened tabs that I have yet to read again… 😅
4. A recent interaction on Threads reminded me to search dub.sh on the web and I saw that they had a way to report shortlinks that make use of their service but are spammy or abusive in some way. I reported two of the most commonly received links I get from spam texts and shared the news on Threads.
5. I reaaally really want to continue working on some of the mini projects I have. One is more of a visualization of how much money I’ve saved bike commuting during the time I was working in a hybrid setup that changed from 1x, 2x, and eventually 3x RTO^[2] in my last job. I worked there for around 2 years, and I’ve been bike commuting since before that, so I figured it would be a good point of reference for anyone considering bike commuting in the Philippines—specifically within Metro Manila—and see the ROI^[3] of bike commuting. I eventually want to make it into a thingy where people can set up their own deets and the thing would compute for you. But that will take longer. Maybe.
6. I’ve had 3 footnotes added now in lieu of setting them up as <abbr> tags since I’m mostly putting this together in Obsidian which makes use of its own flavor of Markdown. I don’t know if footnotes would be the way to go to add random explanations to things; maybe it would be fun. I certainly haven’t really used footnotes much while writing stuff, but maybe this would be a neat way to just jot random notes to the side if I wanted to add more to something else. I’ve seen it done in some blog posts, maybe I can adopt that practice too. While setting up this post I also found out that my 11ty setup doesn’t support styling footnotes yet, so after reading a bit about it from this blog post by Martin Hähnel and also seeing that npm has a bunch of markdown-it plugins listed, I went ahead and set up the one for footnotes. I’ll explore the abbreviations too, eventually. But maybe another day 💭
7. I recently finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and man. I want to talk about it with someone. But my partner hasn’t finished it yet (he’s started it though and it was the reason why I started it too 😆) and most of the people I know who’ve played it aren’t people I can randomly just message, “hey can I share my thoughts about the ___ ending with you?” 🙈 but yeah. It’s a beautiful game. There’s so much to unpack, so many things to discover. Such a neat game.
8. And as a last note: related to #5, another project I wanna start working on is making my own Life in Weeks visualization(here’s one example and another one) and plopping it somewhere here in my website. Though I still do have some hesitation regarding sharing milestones of my life just… out in the open. But, then again, I do that on major social media platforms anyway, and I can always curate what I share publicly, so maybe it can be a nice thing to get back to when I need a little pick-me-up and see how far I’ve been to or just as a way to review what I’ve done so far in life.

Aaaaand there it is, 8 random things! Initially I thought I’d just use my website as a mix of doing microposting and blog posting (since I did add support for no titles and such to kinda work towards that) but I’m thinking maybe having this kind of structure would be good for my blog, and for me to also write more.

Here’s to seeing a new update or one more post added to the tag #8to 😁