Alex Muir

Sitting on a flight yesterday I realised that I take the wonders of air travel for granted. Last week I drove from Budapest to the UK and it took me 28 hours of driving spread over two days. This is at a cost of €300 in fuel, €120 for a ferry and €20 of tolls. The return leg took me two and a half hours at a cost of €80. That’s an incredible difference in cost, time and comfort.

It’s easy to bemoan the lack of glamour in air travel, the shrinking leg-room and the endless upsells. But every single item on the drinks trolley is cheaper than at European motorway services. Sitting in a plane seat is no less comfortable than the driving seat of a car and you are able to read, work, watch TV or sleep.

I’ll never complain about flying again.

It’s just after ten in the morning and I’m sitting on my balcony writing this. The sun is blazing, I’ve got a good cup of coffee. It’s perfection. Last summer I spent two months in Ibiza working on the beach and making friends the the local lizards.

I thought I’d share a few tips I’ve picked up for working while sunbathing.

(I had a quick look around and other articles recommend working in the shade. Bollocks to that. You could always wear this laptop sock.)

Seeing the screen

• Back up. Sitting by the pool in the sun, sipping a cocktail is a high risk environment. It’s like something out of a Health & Safety advert - “circle the risks here”. So do a laptop backup.
• Face the sun. I move around like a human sundial to keep it directly in front of me.
• Clean the screen. This makes a huge difference. Little bits of dirt that are barely noticeable indoors wreak havoc with your eyes outside. Wiping the screen down with glass cleaner massively improves readability.
• Wear a dark T-shirt or no T-shirt. Don’t wear white. The less light that is reflecting off the screen, the better you can see it. And along those lines…
• Prefer working with a dark wall behind you. Again, minimise the amount of light being reflected into the screen.
• Use a white background in whatever program you are using. I work in VIM and change my theme to habiLight which provides the highest contrast I have found.
• I tend to make a cardboard hood that fits around the laptop screen. Yes, I look like a loony typing on a fake laptop made out of cardboard. No, I couldn’t give a shit. Even just a piece of cardboard put behind the screen cuts down on the amount of sun being reflected off the keyboard. This is a big deal on Macbooks because the Aluminium is like a mirror.

• Sunglasses probably help. I don’t wear them but only because I don’t own a pair.
• Make sure the screen brightness is set to max. My laptop turns its brightness down if a menacing cloud comes overhead.

I find that Macbook screens work better than other laptops - despite their high reflectivity. I think this is because they tend to be brighter than any other screen I’ve used. A non-relective screen with the same brightness would probably be best.

Protecting the laptop

Another reason I keep a piece of cardboard behind the laptop is to keep it cool.

Don’t forget your phone. Far too many times I forget all about my phone and pick it up an hour later to find it’s roasting and there’s a message on the screen to say it’s overheated. This probably explains my dismal battery life.

I’ve just been working on adding SVG images to How a Car Works.

As usual, I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall on the best way to store and edit the content of the articles. I’ve tried HTML, Markdown, HTML again with Redactor as the editor, now I’m finding once again that redactor is mangling my HTML source.

“Ahaa!”, I just thought, “I’ll store the articles as HTML files and then I can edit them in VIM or wherever I want.” But not being stored in the database means the articles won’t be searchable.

So now I’m thinking the optimal workflow might be to store all the articles as HTML files. And then each time a file changes, I repopulate the DB with a plaintext version. This allows me to put the articles in version control and to run batch jobs against them. They’d also be synched between my local machine and the production system - at the moment I don’t sync the two DBs.

I’m going to have a bath and think about it.

I’m writing this post in Markdown. Markdown is a language for formatting a piece of writing simply. For example, if I surround something with two asterisks *like this* then it is put in italic. Doing the same thing in HTML requires me to type <i>much more</i>. And visually, in its raw format, markdown makes a lot more sense.

The articles on How a Car Works have gone back-and-forth between HTML and Markdown with every redesign. I’m not even sure what they are stored as now… It’s HTML.

This afternoon I was coding up a system for articles on FrontendHQ and made the decision to go for HTML there too.

I just saw Markdownify, which is a new WYSIWYG-style markdown editor. It made me think that while I love the simplicity of markdown, I’ve given up using it in most use scenarios.

Images

I want control over how my images display in my content. And I usually want them to display in a <figure> tag. Markdown makes both of these hard and hacky.

I also usually want to reference an image from a local library - I don’t want tying in to a absolute URLs. The most recent way I’ve solved this problem is using a custom markdown image tag. For example, in this blog I use {class:something} which just starts to get ridiculous.

Why not HTML?

1. It’s much more hassle to write by hand. <p> tags are easy but <strong> tags start to get a bit much. So I need a WYSIWYG editor but…
2. WYSWYG editors still produce mostly horrible markup, and extending them with something like the custom image syntax above becomes a nightmare. That said, I use Redactor on How a Car Works and it works flawlessly and has a nice code mode. But..
3. WYSIWYG editing is a terrible experience on mobile, and markdown is very efficient.

As ever, it’s horses for courses but this post has reminded me that I really prefer HTML to markdown. I think markdown is solving two problems:

1. Limiting the set of available formatting (which we then bypass by using html tags directly).
2. Producing clean HTML markup at the end.

I’m going to explore the latest version of Redactor to see how well it works on mobile.

Hopefully we’re about to see an end to using Adwords to trick users into downloading crapware-filled versions of free desktop software like Firefox, uTorrent and Chromium.

Google is allowing free software developers to specify their official website in order to prevent peddlars of malware from buying Adwords slots and hawking their cloned, often barely functional, versions filled with whatever nasties they can pack into them.

This is something that has been complained about for a long time. From late-April advertisers will only be able to promote free desktop software downloads from the designated primary distribution source of that software. Project developers are being asked to provide their official download domains.

The full email to advertisers is below. It’s a good solution.

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

We’re writing to let you know about a change to Google’s advertising policies that might affect your AdWords account. Around late April, the Google AdWords policy on unsupported content will change to include additional requirements related to free desktop software downloads. If you don’t promote free desktop software, this change shouldn’t impact you.

After this change, you won’t be allowed to promote free desktop software unless the ad explicitly names the promoted software and leads to the designated primary distribution source for the software.

If you advertise free desktop software, please make sure that your ads and landing pages meet the following standards:

— The ad includes the promoted software’s name

— The ad directs to a landing page on the site that’s designated as the software’s primary distribution source

Google will be providing software developers an opportunity to designate their primary distribution source for use with these ads.

Advertisers will be required to comply with the new AdWords “unsupported content” policy around late April. After the new policy goes into effect, you’ll see details at https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/6023676?hl=en#uc

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

Yes, I know uTorrent isn’t open source and is basically officially filled with malware now. But I don’t stand a chance at drawing the Firefox logo.