Just ran across the Instagram feed of Cristiana Couceiro, a Portuguese illustrator & photographer. Wow; I love her style. She seems drawn to the same broad kinds of subjects that I am: patterns, striking design, etc. (Her personal landing page: https://cristianacouceiro.com/.)

From Kim Landwehr's blog, a spot-on take on Facebook:

Facebook is like an invasive weed that puts its roots everywhere and the only way to get rid of it is to kill it

Oh yes.

(I just found Kim's blog via dailywebthing.)

Have seen several links recently to dailywebthing, a large & terrific directory of indie sites. That link has a daily set of 3 pointers to sites in the directory. This other link is to the linkport directory itself.

I finally added the ability to create picture posts. (I added that during the conversion back to Perch.) The intent is to enable me to post pictures quickly & easily, akin to instagram or twitter. It's just a first draft now. I'll refine it as I go.

I've given up on using Hugo for this site & finally moved back to Perch. The awkwardness of updating a static site just got to be too much, so I stopped posting. Now I can post quickly if I need to, and even update via mobile if I want to.

I'm using Perch Runway now instead of plain Perch. Runway's "collections" map perfectly to how I want to organize my content, and their developer pricing for a non-commercial site means there isn't a price penalty for using Runway. Thanks, Rachel & Drew!

The biggest downside I've found of using Hugo for this site is that it's awkward to create a new post. I have to be at my computer to create a new file (can't use mobile), and then I have to generate & upload to the server. The friction is minor, but it's still a small annoyance.

I'm considering using a headless CMS like strapi.io to remove this friction, but at the cost of more complexity. Mulling it over....

Great collection of personal portfolio sites by Kicks Condor, found via a HN thread for Ali Spittel's nice piece about building a portfolio. I love exploring these personal sites; they can be a fascinating window into someone's life.

Good Sandi Metz post: in software it's important to get the abstractions right, even if it comes at the cost of some duplication. Over time, the wrong or broken abstractions cause way bigger problems than duplication. Ideally you won't have either problem, but if you have to have one then choose the lesser evil of duplication if it enables cleaner abstractions.

"Every practice we use as part of our work puts forces on us, and generally those forces can push us toward or away from more successful ways of doing things." --Ron Jeffries

I tried forestry.io and investigated netlify. Interesting, but the experience is far from frictionless. They still force a good deal of developer-level complexity on you. Short story: neither seems to be the magic bullet I was hoping for.

Minor nit: I save frequently while editing, which creates a stream of work-in-progress commits when using those tools. Annoying.