Hands up if you were into MySpace and personal blogs in the mid early 2000s! Well, I was. I was that low-cost emo kid in school that would use HTML and CSS to change their MySpace page (and that hobby is now paying bills so no complaining).

When I read the recent news that MySpace lost all their content I had an old memory coming back at me.

Back then, when I was using MySpace, you were able to set your “mood” - you may be familiar with that feature because Facebook also had (has?) something similar.

I did a little bit of searching and to my surprise, in 2007, someone did a blog post about MySpace moods that you can still read about today (because owning your own content is cool).

Setting your “mood” as a status wasn’t the main memory coming back. It was actually blogs and what teenagers were doing at the time. Back then, in MySpace you could create “notes” which were more or less like blog entries, and if I remember correctly, at the end of the post you would add something like “Mood, doing, listening, thinking”.

I don’t remember the “doing, listening and thinking” being particular form input fields but rather something that you would add optionally (and manually). The “mood” bit would have a specific set of emotions and emoticons to match. So “Mood, doing, thinking, listening” quickly took over and you could see forum threads with people sharing what was on their minds. I remember it being a trend that I picked up on also, but it quickly transferred to personal blogs.

I tried to find living examples of this but it was so hard. I tried different search engines but whenever I typed “Mood, doing, thinking, listening” almost all results were about mental health even if changed the dates around the results. I still had some urls memorised in my head so I used Wayback Machine and I looked up some blogs that I used to read and I found some real examples in the wild but sadly they do not have styling.

While searching for all this and to my rejoice I found a lovely PDF that talks about “Mood” and “Listening” being a common blog feature and I love it!

So because I am feeling nostalgic I’m going to bring “mood, doing, thinking, listening” back to my blog and be alone oversharing in 2019.

Choosing the emojis

I’ve decided to keep it simple and only add to the footer of the blog post this information. Unlike Livejournal, most personal blogs at the time wouldn't have a matching emoticon to their mood. But I want that. I don't have time to convert the old emoticons to svg (i'm not even sure if I could do that from a legal point view). I also remembered that the phpbb forums had a smiley pack available but the last thing I want is to do requests to mini gifs. But in case you're wondering, I did download the emoticons for the memories's sake.

But it is 2019 and emojis are free. Maybe one day when I am an artist I could add my own drawn emoticons to my emotions. But for now emojis will do. Or maybe, one day, when I am as cool as Aaron I will take it to the next level like he did on his website.

How many emotions do I have?

Not that many and while looking up the list of emotions that were available on My Space and Livejournal, I realised that I don't even know the meaning of some of those words. I tried to come up with own list and I can't lie, I struggled to deal with the negative words. I've been trying to tell my self to only share positive things and sometimes that isn't possible. My negative emotions exist but I think I prefer not having too many available and have a bigger variety of positive emotions.

The following match of emotion with emoji was mostly based on how I think my face looks like when I feel those emotions. I do realise that the name of the emotion and what the emoji is supposed to mean may not match.

Adding these to my blog

This is where I become insecure. I'm sure there's 1000 ways to build the same thing and they are all probably better than the one I've chosen. I don't use any content editor to write for this blog besides writting my own markup. So I didn't implement this by having a drop down that selects the emotion and adds to the post. I could, but I don't have time for that. I'm satisfied with adding it manually.

I searched in GitHub for anything related to Jekyll and Emojis and I did find a couple of things. None of them seem to be exactly what I was looking for (although I could be wrong) but I am not really sure of what I looking for anyway.

To build this I decided to make more use of the Front Matter and include a layout that will render if that information exists.

And that is it. I'm hoping to add more quirks to this blog and I think looking at the past isn't a bad idea. Back then we were far more expressive anyways.

P.S.: Always write and publish when you're happy. I've been having too many bad days in a row and that has stopped me from writing and publishing more. I can't take a nice day for granted. This small and not so important post was written in the end of March.

TIL: Front Matter accepts emojis.

Holding on to everything because I was actually terrified 😂

This “bookmarking” format doesn’t seem to be working for me because of the way I am doing this. It also seems that I am bookmarking more and more things and I leave all the bookmarks to the last days of the month. I feel like I don’t have enough time to give them proper treatment. I want to share my favourite quotes and my opinions on them and this method seems rushed. I might go back to my original plan of doing them every two weeks.

I have also decided to split between tech and non-tech related articles because I feel that the amount should be the same (and it currently isn’t).

Also this month went by too quickly. Too quickly.

Bookmarks from March

Non-tech articles

• Volunteering in orphanages - by Unicef.
• I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It. - by Kevin Alexander
• The Weight of Words: Self-Acceptance Doesn’t Have to Be a Solo Journey - by Nicole Zhu
• The Poor Can’t Afford Not to Wear Nice Clothes - by Tressie McMillan Cottom
• You don’t need more than a warm smile to fly with babies… - by Eva Wiseman
• Journey of a Fashionable Minimalist: Episode 3 – Discovering minimalism - by Georgie Luhur Cooke
• Sorry to bother you, but do you say “sorry” too much? What to say instead - by Daniella Balarezo

Tech related content

• Content-based grid tracks and embracing flexibility - by Hidde de Vries
• Having an open dialog - by Scott O'Hara
• CSS Shapes Resources - by Kristopher Van Sant
• Fighting uphill - by Eric Bailey
• Help! None of my projects want to be SPAs - by Jason Goldstein
• Building Intelligent Layouts with CSS Grid - by Michelle Barker
• Web Accessibility Guide - by Stefan Fejes
• CSS Specificity - by Estelle Weyl
• How I Started Reading mix-blend-mode and What They Are Creating with It - by Wei Gao
• The web we broke. - by Ethan Marcotte
• Accessibility Insights - by Microsoft
• Colourise.sg - by Andrew Tan, Preston Lim and Tan Kai Wei
• Tinkersynth - by Josh Comeau
• Layered parallax effect - by Thea
• How to design an accessible color scheme - by Katie Riley
• CSS Scroll Snap: How Do I Look In This? - by Olivia Ng
• JS Paint - by Isaiah Odhner
• React fragments - by Sarah Chima
• CSS Grid: Floor Plan - by Olivia Ng
• An introduction to web components - by Caleb Williams
• Accessible Brand Colors - by Use All Five
• Offline Homebrewing - by Benjamin Parry
• Always Own Your Platform - by Sean Blanda
• Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders - by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis
• Becoming a tech speaker - by Michelle Barker
• An Introduction to Static Site Generators - by Eduardo Bouças
• Making Generative Music in the Browser - by Alex Bainter
• Piccalili - Issue 1 - by Andy Bell

Things that made me smile one way or another

• Developurrs - #013 - Ana Rodrigues with Jessie - by Andy Bell and me

A while back someone I know that has a role in a product team (so, not a developer) showed me their brand new feature. Because I had just been working on a similar feature I decided to see how they were doing the keyboard navigation of that feature (because I wanted to learn and improve mine). They weren’t. So it wasn’t accessible. At the time, it wasn’t possible to see the contents of that feature using the keyboard at all.

I reported back to them and explained what happened when I used it and their reply was something along the lines “that’s a disappointment - I expected our developers to do better”. They took the feedback and improved it. When I heard their disappointment with their team, it reminded me of a quote from Mindera’s culture book that stayed with me: “It’s everyone’s job”. And I try, sometimes fighting my own blind spots, to apply it whenever I can.

An unaccessible feature will go live when any of these steps fails:

• The client/product/tickets don’t mention it in their requirements;
• It is designed without accessibility in mind;
• When the code developed isn't accessible;
• When in the code review it isn't flagged;
• When the accessibility of a feature isn’t tested in the testing environments;

At any moment, anyone in team can flag that something is missing, broken or can be improved. Everyone reads the tickets/acceptance criteria, everyone sees the designs, someone develops but someone reviews the code, everyone testes it (and most of the times, they will use the ticket’s acceptance criteria as a reference of what to test).

It is important to be everyone’s job because no one is perfect. Because mistakes can be made but mostly because we are all learning. In every single mentioned step there could be someone who just started that particular role, for example, and they will learn from these interactions and it will become part of their routine for their next tasks.

Apply the "it's everyone's job" where you can and everyone in the team will learn a skill for the future.