Website
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I decided to switch my regular blog updates from weeknotes to monthnotes. When I started these weeknotes, it was to give myself some accountability to make consistent progress on my projects. They have done that to some degree. The trouble is that writing is a lot of work for me, and many weeks the blog update has become the project. I’ve often wondered if I could be spending that time better. Falling so far behind this year broke the spell of feeling my small audience needed such frequent updates, and taking so long to catch up cemented my sense that they’re a major task to write. By that week the idea of scaling back had become much less a vague potential and more a sharp necessity.
So July begins a new chapter of my blog updates where I’ll post them once a month, still with the same kind of content, hopefully interspersed with other kinds of posts. This will clear time for more project work, more experiments in motivating and reporting my progress, and maybe even more posts to places like Instagram, or at least more timely ones.
Productivity
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I dipped my toe into creating Chrome extensions starting with a web page title updater. I use a Windows app called ManicTime to help me recall what I did on the computer throughout the day so I can record it in my schedule tracker spreadsheet, and to do that ManicTime continually records the title of whatever window is in focus. Sometimes the title is very generic, like in the Outlook web interface, which basically just says, “Mail.” So I had Claude get me started on a Chrome extension that would find the active email message and add its details to the page title, which ManicTime could then pick up. It also updates titles for our internal product management system, and I may add other sites. After many weeks of procrastinating on the idea it was surprisingly easy to get something working. It turns out Chrome extensions aren’t complicated to begin with, and Claude filled in the many gaps in my JavaScript knowledge.
Nature
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I spied fireflies in my apartment yard. Occasionally I hear worries that fireflies are dying out like the bees. I’ve also heard their imminent demise is just a viral myth. It’s true that I haven’t seen as many here as I did growing up, but they’re still around. I found them meandering in our yard.
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