I’ve had this image in the header of a character from Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky saying “Make the code good and complicated” saved in my camera roll for over a year now and wanted to finally use it. I admittedly don’t remember what it is in reference to but he perfectly describes what I delusionally think of my own engineering ability so it made me chuckle. And since it’s “code” related, at least on the surface, I might as well write a quick note/changelog 🪵 about a few code changes I made to my site recently:

• Upgraded Tailwind CSS from v3 to v4

This was surprisingly painless, I mostly followed the official upgrade guide. Because I have some arbitrary values in my use of CSS Grid the one thing that almost tripped me up was needing to replace usage of commas that were intended to be spaces with underscores (link). Otherwise, easy!

• Added an RSS feed

An overdue feature was adopting the tried and true technology of the RSS feed. I know I’m not much of a blogger but I feel like it’s just good policy and practice to have a feed. That is now operational here. I found this post from Piccalilli to be a valuable resource on how to get started with syndication feeds.

• Removed Windows styles

I used to have this Easter egg that was pretty much only there to fulfill my desire for mindless clicking and nostalgia. If you clicked on the browser controls they would switch between different Windows-inspired styles.

I borrowed these styles from fun, novelty design systems created by various talented people (98, XP, 7). This had been on my site for a while, and even though it was all just for fun, it was a lot of CSS for little value. I kind of got bored with it, and maybe it would be better to simulate the “minimize”, “maximize”, and “close” actions of a browser for predictable UX. Anyhoo, figured I hadn’t talked “code” in a while so there you have it.

And once more for posterity:

Make the code good and complicated.

 General Muoro (モウロ将軍), Castle in the Sky