With the update to Blot on August 4th changes were made that had an impact for your Blog if you are using the Disqus plugin for comments. This changes could result in missing comments for all or some of your posts. Well the comments are still available via Disqus but due to a technicality the ‘old’ comments could not always be linked to the correct blog post. During the same weekend these changes have been reverted, so everything should be back in working order.

Since I also had to make a change to my template as a result of the change I had to review data stored at Disqus to figure out what was wrong and if I could fix something on my end.

I have always had a liking for miniature things. As a kid I didn’t want a train of the HO scale (1:87), but had my mind set on Minitrix or Trix for short (N scale, 1:148). If I had known at that age there is also a Z scale (1:220), I probably would have nagged my parents to get that one instead .

Model train scale comparison

Later this turned into fondness for miniature computing platforms like Arduino and the Raspberry Pi.

After removing the jQuery code for the archives page I reviewed the code I have been adding to the script scripts.js in order to determine if even more code can be removed and replaced with just CSS. And there was.

The focus this time was on the code I added to add drop shadows to images that are ending with -ds. Using a selector based on the src attribute for img elements it is possible to recreate this feature by just using CSS.

The last time I have updated the design (somewhere in September 2015) for the Archives page I added some jQuery code so you could expand/collapse months in an attempt to keep the page (height wise) fairly small.

But ever since I saw the following tweet I had the feeling I should revisit the coding of the Archives page

You Don't Need JavaScript - https://t.co/M3u4lOUxst - Common JS components implemented in CSS only. Demos included pic.twitter.com/ZY68FXt1M9

— Umar Hansa (@umaar) July 11, 2016

On the linked GitHub repo is a demo available for ‘Accordion/Toggle’ which is very similar to what I had implemented for the Archives page.

When you are downloading a file to your Mac you can track the download progress directly on the Downloads folder in the Dock

Download in progress

Most of the times when the download has finished the progress bar disappears, but from time to time the progression bar seems to be ‘stuck’.

My dad is visually impaired and makes use of a PC with specialized hardware (Braille reader) and software (Screen-reader, Speech, Zoom) to keep up with the current news. He mostly relies on the Screen-reader (Super Nova/Dolphin) and Speech module (Fluent Dutch).

Using ‘Passend Lezen’ he is subscribed to several newspapers which are delivered as an attachment to his mailbox on a daily, weekly, monthly base depending on the release schedule of the newspapers. These attachments can be read using a piece of software named XML Reader, which is a specialized piece of software developed for Passend Lezen.