Some of the coolest stuff from this past week.
Hey Friends! Is it just me, or is September moving in overdrive? Either way, here are some of the coolest things that I’ve found worth sharing from this past week.
Substack:
You might have noticed that I am writing on substack now. I’ve migrated the best of my old blog here (which was surprisingly painless), and I’m really enjoying the experience so far.
I got sick of updating and troubleshooting WordPress, and I realized I was paying for web hosting unnecessarily. I am in the process of rebuilding my website: mmacfadden.com by hardcoding it using a combination of PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript 🤓.
Austin Kleon:
If you don’t know Austin Kleon, and you consider yourself creative, stop reading this and check out his book: Steal Like an Artist. Then read his other two books: Show Your Work and Keep Going, and while you’re at it, subscribe to his Substack.
Austin is an inspiration. In a future season of life, I’d love to emulate what he is doing creatively and professionally.
Over Scoped:
I recently shared a conversation with David Abzug, Game Design and Development Program Head at Bradley University. He stated that nearly every game he encounters is: over scoped, needs more player communication, and needs more polish.
Even if you don’t build video games, there’s a lot to take away from this creatively: a smaller, intuitive, detail oriented project that you actually finish is always better than a larger, confusing, and sloppy project that never sees the light of day.
Takeya 24 oz. Water Bottle:
I’ve been drinking out of a new water bottle this school year (exciting I know). The 24 oz. Takeya Water Bottle in Arctic White is relatively inexpensive, holds the perfect amount of water for 90 minutes of instruction, and comes with a rubber boot that I didn’t know I needed but now can’t live without.
HTML:
I’ve been writing HTML Code since 2008, and I just learned of a new tag: <base href="/">. In short, this allows you to set all relative links in a webpage to the same “base” location.
For the PHP development that I mentioned above, this has allowed me to organize pages in the root folder AND subfolders while using the same header.php file with the <?php include(); ?> function!
It’s the little things that make life worth living.