A weekly note

Willy’s Wonderland wasn’t a good movie, but would make a fun short film if you pieced together all the pieces of Nic Cage playing pinball and cleaning.

A few years ago, I admitted that I give Nicolas Cage a lot of grief. In the years since, I’ve made somewhat of a reversal and decided to just embrace him for who he is.

Mandy was super cool. Color Out of Space was super trippy. And then there are 13 other movies he made in the last 3 years which makes it just impossible to keep track anyway. I haven’t watched those.

I guess my conclusion is. Yes, I’ll now give Nic Cage a shot, but every time you blink there’s a new movie and I’m not going to give all those a shot.

Because you cared.

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Hey, at least I didn’t try to explain 5 day again.

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Happy 18th birthday, WordPress! A broad brush of the first 40%. Some fun reflection packed into that timeline.

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I’ve shamelessly enjoyed Olivia Rodrigo’s drivers license over the last few months because it has this great, deep, almost dissonant wave of sound going on in the background at points.

Alanis Morissette’s new song, Rest, also has this great, deep, almost dissonant wave of sound going on in the background at points.

This is even more great because I immediately enjoyed Rest more and now when I want that vibe I can go there instead of a high school breakup song? 🎶

But props to both! drivers license has been played 750 million times on Spotify, which is absolutely mind boggling for something that’s been out less than 5 months.

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We’re in a weird place with WordPress development where this whole new super cool future way of doing things is hanging out just around the corner teasing us. We can build new sites that use some of these features, but can’t necessarily commit to a repeatable strategy because anything we’re doing now is probably going to need rebuilding in some way when the dust settles.

So I feel okay doing fun hacky shit like using the first image block in a post as its post thumbnail just to scratch an itch.

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I also made a srcset reduction plugin without completely thinking through the consequences. Tagline: “It might also break everything? I dunno.”

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I’m using both of those on the newly refreshed Fish Tacos.

First, I like to post fish tacos using my phone and have found it much easier to insert an image block than to navigate to the featured image panel.

And, this content is generally only a single image per post. When that’s a featured image, it doesn’t show up in an RSS feed. Boring!

So, I use Block Post Thumbnail to filter in the image ID of the first image block in post content for use in things like archive views.

And second, the Eksell theme that I just switched to is absolutely beautiful, but WordPress seems a little overeager with how it populates the srcset attribute on post thumbnails. Even though Eksell is requesting a 1080px image to fit in a max 600-ish-px box, WordPress is offering much larger versions to large screens.

So, I’m using Remove Oversized srcset Values to just remove any srcset size larger than the one being requested.

And now the site is snappy and pleasant to look at. And on a new server with PHP 7.4.

Registration is still open if you want in on the fish tacos fun! Just ping me so I can sort through all the bots and actually send you a registration email.

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All that said, fishtacos.blog is probably the site I should make FSE compatible first.

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I thought I had some other stuff, but I don’t. Happy weekend! 🍻

P.S. Happy Prime is hiring, spread the word.