I have decided to not blog.

published on December 28, 2022

I have recently been reading a lot given that I had a lot of time on my hands. Many of my readings have been about my work, what I'm passionate about in my work — how to build amazing experiences on the web and native platforms.

So I have quickly put together this not blog to share not posts here. Read along if you’re curious what this crazy idea is about.

What is a not blog?

I get an urge to try things out when I read about them. For example: I like a lot the has() CSS selector features. So I naturally want to try them out. But a traditional blog doesn’t offer the opportunity to actually embed code easily into a post, like the features I’m trying out.

I could embed some tool into the post with code examples but I am not a big fan of such tools.

Also, I would like to share the experience of building something from scratch, this not blog, so that whoever is curious, can follow how I build it.

For instance, I would like to experiment and showcase how the has() selector works. For this I created the below figure:


  <figure>
    <img src="/public/images/nothing_at_all_aiseo_art.jpg" />
  </figure>
  

which renders like this:

AI generated image, without figcaption

the above figure with the colorful image and the one below look different only because the bottom one has a figcaption.


  <figure>
    <img src="/public/images/nothing_at_all_aiseo_art.jpg" />
    <figcaption>image generated with <a href="https://art.aiseo.ai" target="_blank">https://art.aiseo.ai</a></figcaption>
  </figure>
  
AI generated image, with figcaption
image generated with https://art.aiseo.ai

Here’s the selector that makes this possible (nb. stable Firefox seems to not support has() by default yet):


  .post figure:has(figcaption) {
      background: var(--color-neutral-7);
      padding: 2rem;
      max-width: 50ch;
      display: flex;
      flex-direction: column;
      align-items: center;
      gap: 1rem;
  }
  

The browser will add the additional styling only to the figures that have a figcaption style.

So if you are interested in Go, SwiftUI, good CSS practices and on top of everything a very iterative, lean delivey approach follow the story here.