Week Notes 10/03/23
2023-03-10
Back again for another Week notes post. This time featuring not using Office, learning more about typography, capturing ideas, and using service workers and Progressive Web Applications.
This week I have:
- [stopped using Microsoft Office and cleared the heck out of my email system](https://careful.digital/commons/blog/living-without-microsoft-office. That was good.
- Discovered more about typography and fonts. I finished Matej Latin's course on typography - which was very helpful and which I recommend. I also bought his book - Matej has just been laid off by GitLab so very happy to support him given what I've learnt from him already.
- Andy Bell's blog post on making content look good was also super-helpful. I felt like I was the perfect audience, as a mostly developer-type looking to understand more about typography. The post was practical and really demonstrated the benefits of making an effort. I've made some changes to this site already in line with Andy's approach.
- I've been thinking about how I capture ideas and notes.. Writing a Week Note is a great example of how keeping a repository of half-formed ideas is useful - as I write I'm scanning through my recent Apple Notes, reminding myself of all the strange thoughts I've been having this week!
- In Chris Ferdinandi's VanillaJS course we've been covering Service Workers, which has been incredibly interesting and useful. It's also made me reflect deeply on the possibilities of Progressive Web Applications. (There's an excellent guide to PWAs on the web.dev website)
- I've been working on a website to make biodiversity data accessible (using the National Biodiversity Network's API) and have been able to make the website work offline using service workers, including caching any data that has already been accessed. In combination with making the website a PWA, this means that someone can install the site as an app, and view data about a location they are visiting, and then can go out to the location, where there may be no connectivity, and continue to access that data on-site. It feels like a really nice use case for service workers, and for the whole PWA concept.
- I think PWAs, with their inherent combination of accessibility, resilience, performance and adherence to web standards, will be a really important part of what Careful Digital offer in the future.
That's all for now. Have a great weekend, everyone.
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