This morning I’m listening to Scary Pockets. Covers of pop in a funky style. I enjoy much of it. It veers into what younger me would call “easy listening” which is a red flag. Music must be interesting. They manage to make it funky and fun and danceable. I started listening to Scary Pockets because of the cover of Rodrigo’s “deja vu” they do with Lawrence.
It’s chillier. The sea is chillier. The air is chillier. The atmosphere of the world is chillier. War and horrors continue in Ukraine and Palestine.
Bundle up.
I’ve got more I want to do on this here website, and more I want to do with my headers. That was fun yesterday. It’s also fun to embed a header. Here’s another! It’s from 2001. I still wonder if anyone is reading this.
Yesterday I was looking at Squarespace’s ability to set a focal point on images and image blocks which can resize. Using focal points to center images. I was impressed by the documentation overall with Squarespace. This article on image handling was very helpful to get me up to speed quickly.
Many image areas on your site have a built-in centering feature called the focal point. The focal point sets the focus of an image, giving you control over where the image is centered.
WIX has a similar feature — Wix Pro Gallery: Changing the Focal Point of an Image or Video
I have not experimented with it, but they accomplish this with native HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Using Focal Points, Aspect Ratio & Object-Fit To Crop Images Correctly by Henry Desroches is on my to-read list.
Computers are terrible.
But.
I remain committed to the idea that HTML and CSS are amazing. In that spirit I enjoyed Three decades of HTML–a reminiscence by the eminent Eric Meyer.
I remember my own first experience writing HTML. I wrote it out by hand on the night shift (seven p to seven a) working as a respiratory therapist at a big hospital in downtown Los Angeles.
I had a copy of Laura Lemay’s Teach Yourself Web Publishing With Html 3.2 in 14 Days. Did I get that at Opamp Books in Hollywood? Or Midnight Special Books in Santa Monica? Or Borders across the street from the Beverly Center? I can’t remember. But I didn’t get it on Amazon or eBay.
I would read about tags, and how they would have an effect. About what an href attribute was. It seemed like the fact that the img tag used src and not href bothered me a bit.
I wrote HTML code on the the back of my assignment sheet.
On the front? A list of patients whose ventilators I was helping manage, or on oxygen, or in croup tents maintained by the respiratory therapy department. Printed out at the beginning of the shift on a dot matrix printer by whoever was shift supervisor.
On the back? HTML code I hand wrote in pen, tag by tag. No computer to test on. This was not UVA, no computers for the RTs, really. UVa was very computerized: MEDLINE in the offices with weird terminal interfaces to look up journal articles. We could check standing orders on a computer! But the downtown hospital was mostly paper.
I kept the assignment sheet and took it home and would take it to UCLA Extension or computer-time-rental places Input/Output Center on Sunset Blvd or Kinko’s so I could type it into a computer and see what it did.
It’s a good morning to remember.
So many moments have brought me to where I am this morning.
Onward.
