Apologies

I've been very busy

Chas.

Aug 28, 2023

It has been a few months since I last posted here, and not for lack of wanting to or potential topics.

But I want to move CC off of Substack and onto my own site running on Vercel. I’m also heavily involved in several other projects:

A site promoting “craft coding” as a response to all the hype around AI
A site teaching web development from scratch using the craft code approach
A site explaining the methodology for teaching/learning used (I have my own detailed methodology)
A personal philosophical site composed as a love letter to my partner, Hannah

That’s a lot of work to hand code! I’m keeping the sites fairly similar, but still … too much duplication. And, um, I am doing this as a solo coder, with only a bit of advice from a couple of designers.

So the obvious solution was to build a component library. One of my goals with this code is no client-side dependencies other than my own code. And the most efficient component library would obviously be one that met my needs exactly.

I also wanted the component library to make it easy to add metadata/microdata using either linked data or item-props or whatever. And I wanted the components to be 100% accessible, i.e., AAA on WCAG 2.2. Oh, and I wanted everything to work as plain HTML, with or without the CSS or JavaScript (but then to be progressively enhanced as CSS and JavaScript became available).

Heh, heh. This is a massive undertaking. And I have to do all the design, UX, etc. work as well. I’m keeping it simple, as one of my rules is “keep it simple” and one of my axioms is “less is more”. But even kept very simple, it is still gargantuan. Fortunately, I am able to leverage some work I did for pay over the past few years.

The component library is very nearly ready. I have some CSS tweaks and a few JS scripts to add. And there is a very powerful JS validation engine that needs a bit of a refactor, but isn’t really necessary yet.

I plan to debut the new Cantankerous Coder site roughly simultaneously with the Craft Code site, and then spend the rest of the year working on the training and pedagogy sites. The philisophical site will come along as time permits.

I will post here when the new Cantankerous Coder site is available and will send an email with a subscribe link to all current subscribers on this list when the time comes. The domain will be moved to the new site. The Substack version will eventually be retired.

If you’re still out there you hardy few, thanks much for your patience. I will try to make posts weekly or fortnightly until the new sites are up and then more often still. I’ve got plenty of cantankering built up.