For Tech Midwest 2017, I submitted a five-minute Lightning Talk entitled Choosing a License for your Open Source Project.
The slides are embedded below. If there is video or audio of the talk, it will be added here.
I’m not very nice to my books. I dogear the pages, write in the margins, underline passages and sometimes break the spines (never intentionally). It’s my quest in life to learn as much as possible, and my path to do that is littered with ruined books.
It wasn’t always this way, though.
Throughout my adolescence and early adulthood, I revered books. I loved the way they looked on the shelves, the perfect smoothness of a well-handled spine, all of it. My time working at Barnes and Noble put me in the company of a lot of book people. They, like me, held a similar reverence for the printed word.
I looked askance at those who didn’t take care of their books. Who didn’t dust their shelves, who didn’t write in a notebook instead of a margin, who didn’t do any of the things I considered necessary for the curator of a library, or the owner of books.
Fast forward several years. I’m staring at the folder containing my personal webpage, my finger hovering over the delete key.
I want to keep it so badly.
But I can’t. It’s getting in the way.
I had spent the better part of the last week trying to integrate a statically generated blog onto the website. For a long time, I heard calls to start a blog from many of my favorite online columnists, and thought “That would be a good thing to do…on another day.”
By the time I wanted to actually start a blog, my homepage sat before me, taunting me. I liked its simple look and straightforward design. I agonized for days trying to integrate a blogroll onto the site. I just couldn’t make it happen, and it soon became apparent:
I had to kill my webpage to move on with my life.
There was no funeral.
In the end, I found a static site generator that I liked and applied a theme that I didn’t hate. Kept most of the text from the original homepage for this new one, and moved on with my life.
It comes back to what many people have said, but in my opinion Amy Hoy said it best:
Just. Fucking. Ship.
I can tell you from personal experience that you’re going to waste an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to make your way around all of these barriers you’ve set up for yourself.
Instead, consider just shipping. Get something done. Get your energy back.
Move on with your life.
In my work sprucing up College Hill Creative’s homepage, I discovered something that bothered me at the bottom of each page. The roster was formatted like so:
<p style="text-align: center">
Name Number One | Title Number One<br/>
Slightly Shorter | Shorter Title<br/>
Tiny | Tiny<br/>
</p>
It rendered like this:
Name Number One | Title Number One
Slightly Shorter | Shorter Title
Tiny | Tiny
The fact that the text wasn’t centered on the pipes bothered me significantly, and I went to work trying to fix the issue.
My initial searches led me to attempt to maintain whitespace inside of the p element. This got close, but was too finicky and lacked precision. After spending some additional time trying in vain to solve the problem on my own, I reached out to the devICT Slack channel for help.
Barrett Morgan offered the following suggestion:
@jmmoore you might try wrapping each side of the pipe in divs that are 50% wide. Then right aligning one side and left aligning the other…
He provided some sample code as well:
It rendered relatively close to the way I wanted but the centering still wasn’t exactly where I wanted it to be. However, I took his suggestions and spent some time trying different margin combinations. After some experimentation, putting the pipe character inside its own classed div did the trick.
The final version that works is on JSFiddle, embedded below:
This doesn’t strike me as a particularly elegant solution, so if you have solved this problem in a different way, please reach out to me on Twitter!