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Podcast: Being known for past work
A podcast about the meaning of fame, and what's better about being in the moment.
It's great that the Bootswatch guy is narrating his work in converting from Bootstrap 2.
He calls it a big win, but I can do a little reading-between-the-lines in his post:
1. Easier to customize -- I can't comment since I don't customize Bootstrap, but I benefit from others doing so. Such as Bootswatch. So if he says it's cool, I'll go with that.
2. Smaller file sizes -- not a big issue for me. I think the files were already pretty small.
3. Mobile first -- much more powerful grid system. Ooops. I had just barely begun to understand the old grid system. "Much more powerful" usually means much more complicated. And to think of all the places we've deployed the old grid system without factoring.
4. New components -- a good thing of course.
5. They switched from camelCase to hyphens -- A style war. The people who wanted change won? Make-work for the rest of us. Ugh.
6. Easy to transition -- remains to be seen. Based on what it sounds like, and from my own early experiments, it seems it'll be a while before Fargo and its sites transition from Bootstrap 2 to 3. It seems at some point it'll be inevitable. I much prefer to add new features to my software, or maybe take a bike ride, or perish the thought -- write docs.
One more thing, I wish there were a rule that you had to put your name on your blog so that people who wanted to respond, such as myself, didn't have to say "The Bootswatch Guy" or "he" (assuming it's a he, when it might not be). It's looks like he's Thomas Park. If so, thanks for the great work! I love the templates and the site.
BTW, my name is Dave.
Update: Thomas Park is indeed the Bootswatch guy.
Chuck Shotton came out with a coool little script that adds a scratchpad area in the right margin of Fargo. I tried it out and it seems to work as advertised. I'm going to leave it there for a while and see if I use it.
He wrote his docs before the new reader macro came out (yesterday), and his docs could certainly benefit from using it. Here's how:
<%reader ("https://www.dropbox.com/s/lvds29kojj96u4d/chucks_menubar.opml")%>
Also, I made a tweak to the <%reader%> macro just now to change www.dropbox.com to dl.dropboxusercontent.com. This is a CORS thing. We need to have permission to read the resource from the web page. Dropbox has CORS settings that allow this for the latter domain, not the former. Now you can go ahead and use the address Dropbox gives you, and Fargo will automatically fix it before the page is rendered.
This is scripting.com after all, and we like these kinds of technical details here.
PS: I came across this Dropbox tech note in my travels about providing love for "static" JavaScript apps. Like Fargo! No wonder Dropbox worked so well for us.
If I told my grandfather Rudy Kiesler that I hit a home run in baseball, or that I thought the Mets would win the World Series, or that men just landed on the moon, he would invariably respond: "You don't say!" Maybe he wasn't even listening. But he had always had a response ready just in case.
Now my brother and I joke about it. I can always say it, in a thick Eastern European accent, and it's good for a laugh. It's our way of remembering him, even if no one else does.
So when President Obama went on Jay Leno last night and said:
"We don't have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat. And that information is useful. But what I've said before I want to make sure I repeat, and that is we should be skeptical about the potential encroachments on privacy. None of the revelations show that government has actually abused these powers, but they're pretty significant powers."
It's what he didn't say that is so interesting.
"None of the revelations show that government has actually abused these powers."
A politician chooses his words carefully. "None of the revelations show" is not the same as saying "It hasn't happened." More whistleblowers need to come forward to make that verbal trick not work.
He also didn't say why, given the risks, that he acknowledges, how and when we decided this was where we wanted to go. When was it discussed in an election campaign? When was it debated publicly in Congress? When was an amendment to the Constitution passed that gave the executive branch such sweeping powers to investigate us. When did We The People get a say in giving such enormous power to elected and non-elected officials?
Both my grandfathers were immigrants to this country who fled from governments that wanted them dead, for being Jewish. In those days, where they lived, this was a crime punishable by death. So you can't tell me that governments made up of ordinary humans are incapable of using this kind of information to turn life into a living hell.
At least my grandparents had somewhere to run. Now, this place they came to with their families, fleeing for their lives, is developing the kind of surveillance state their persecutors could only dream of. It's enormously naive to think it won't be used this way. It will. And I think the President more or less admitted that it already has.
It's even worse than it appears. © 1997-2013 Scripting News, Inc.