⑮ Thoughts for the week 15

An audio version of this blog post.

I’ve written a lot about animals over the past month. I previously talked about attempting – and subsequently failing – to make impenetrable forts in the process of trying to capture Monty the field mouse. I also introduced you to Montezuma, Monty’s smaller, cuter, faster successor.

Along with Reliant the very stupid bird, Montezuma, and the massive ants that this building seems to get every year, our home has been more like a really shit zoo for the past few weeks. We keep this place god-damn spotless. It’s cleaner than a level 5 bio unit in here, but a combination of all of our neighbours having cats (and me be allergic so not having one), us being closest to the big tree outside our building, and also being top floor and therefore top of the water stack, make this the easiest or potentially safest place for some animals. It is what it is.

Well, the shit zoo is one animal down this week. And I’m delighted to say that I learned my lessons from the last time I built a fort. With some extra baseboard that I had lying around, some quick reactions, and a lot of luck, I managed – over the space of about an hour – to get Montezuma into a box. We released him close to a field, a couple miles away yesterday evening. He was scared, of course, but I’m hoping he’s living his best life out there in the big wide world. 🐁


This week I released Content Visibility Geolocation. You can limit who sees your content based on a visitor’s location. There’s no options or settings. You choose the countries you want to show or hide your blocks from, and press publish. I really love the fact it’s just plug and play and should you wish, you can even host the geolocation API yourself as it’s open source. I hope you love it. 🌎

🇺🇸 Hi there visitor from the United States! I’m super jealous of your vaccine rollout, but I’m really, super happy that you’re all going to be able to get out of this mess pretty soon. Sending ♥️ your way.

🇨🇦 Visiting from Canada, eh? That’s pretty neat! Welcome.

Note: If you’re visiting from the US or Canada, you will see one piece of text between the geolocation add-on intro and this one. If you’re sneaky and want to see what shows for the other country, you might try a VPN for example. You’ll need to remove a cookie if you want to do that 😉


It’s precisely 8 years since I first landed in Canada. I wrote about my first day a while back and I still don’t know why it’s called a broiler. ♨️


I’ve banged on about BC’s numbers over the past few weeks and months and I promise you I really want to stop doing that. Yesterday we announced over 1,300 new cases; easily our highest 1-day total. I’ve also talked about the race between vaccines and variants.

We’ve lost the race. The variants ran over the finish line several weeks ago, and we’re still meandering along on the back straight. We’re acting like we’re still in the race. The race is over. And we need to act accordingly.

I was going to write “Frustrated continues to be the wrong word” as I’ve sardonically done over the past few weeks. But it’s just not enough.

Elsewhere, several weeks ago, I predicted we’d be up above 1,400 cases by the middle of April. I thought I was being pessimistic. 😡


Last week, if you subscribe to my blog via RSS, you’ll have seen that I shared a zip of the RSS feeds that I’ve used over the past number of years to keep me up to date with the comings and goings of the web development industry. I think there’s an opportunity for me to share things for RSS Feed readers first, and then maybe share those things publicly at a later date. Shameless plug: I’d do that using my RSS Feed Add-On for Content Visibility. 📚


Some work on the balcony was possible this week. And the forecast for next week is looking glorious, so hopefully we can get it finished up. 💐


9(!) years ago I wrote a Google Chrome add-on which I called Delectable which allowed you to quickly share a link you find to your own WordPress site. 3 days ago, Felix wrote about how we can do this natively on phones now and I think that is awesome. I’m still rubbish at JavaScript. 🔗

Bloo is an open-source low-fidelity wireframe kit. We’ll be starting to need to wireframe bits and pieces over the next little while at work and this will come in super useful. 🟦


BC COVID-19 Vaccine Count: 19.9% (+3.2%) and 17.9% (+3.2%) Canada-wide. 👩🏼‍⚕️