At 54 years old, I just started a YouTube channel.
This is an experiment. I recently read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments and decided to try something I haven’t done before: creating my own videos, not for a company or conference, but for anyone who might find them useful.
Quite literally: this blog is now officially in autumn mode! 🍂
During our summer vacation, while watching over our dog Elvis, I spent some time doing recreational coding on the balcony of our vacation home in Sottomarina, Italy. The result is a seasonal bit of JavaScript/SVG animation for this blog’s header, which you can now enjoy on the main page, constantin.glez.de. But only during the autumn months, of course!
What started as a simple idea to add variety to my header turned into a 903-line journey of learning physics, mastering SVG patterns, and discovering just how much fun coding can be when there are no deadlines or requirements—just curiosity and Claude as my sparring partner. 🎯
Here’s what I learned along the way:
Over the last few days, I’ve been working on putting Elvis, our Dachshund, onto this blog’s banner. The goal was to create a smooth animation where Elvis appears by rising from the bottom of the banner, then leans his paws over the border—adding some personality to the site while exploring modern web animation techniques.
Refactoring my banner into SVG was only the beginning: the next step was animation. I continued with the “AI as a teacher” model and asked Claude to explain to me concepts like IIFE, how the browser’s DOM processes SVG elements, which SVG properties are GPU-accelerated and other CSS performance conc…
This weekend, I added Webmention support to this blog. What is it? From the Webmention W3C recommendation:
“Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver’s perspective, it’s a way to request notifications when other sites mention it.”
Think of it …
As of today, this blog has a “now page”. What is a “now page”? It’s a really good idea by Derek Sivers. From nownownow.com:
“a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life.”
Back then in the good old days of Unix, we called it a .plan file. Today, it’s not easy to…
It’s been a while since I was up to date on image formats for the web. Back then in the 90s, I actually read the original JPEG paper in order to understand how it worked, because I was preparing a presentation to my study group on the MPEG paper and needed to understand how I-frames were encoded. At…
While refactoring my blog, I discovered the IndieWeb community. From the website:
“We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and ownin…
So, I did it again! In the near future, I plan to blog more often (this time for real). But, meanwhile, my blogging setup felt a bit dated. So I re-factored it again. How?
I used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet (first 3.5, then 3.7) to help me refactor stuff. Claude lives inside my new favourite code edi…
When writing my post on renovations, while mentioning automatic link checking and automatic HTML checking, I thought to myself: “Hey, how about automatic spell-checking?”. After all, OSes, word processors, etc. come with some built in spell checking.
Some research pointed me at LanguageTool. It’s free for basic use, open source, built in Europe, and has credible customers. It also supports multiple languages. And Markdown. What’s not to love?
(BTW, this is my first post in the “link post” format, popularized by John Gruber and others. These are short posts about cool, useful, or otherwise interesting links I found on the web. Just click on the post title to check it out.)
When I started blogging in the early 2000s, RSS emerged as an open standard for spreading the news. New post? Blam, everybody interested got a notification in their favorite newsreader. Back then, building a proper RSS feed was more of an art than an exact science: Crafting proper XML while taking a…
A long time ago (2017), I wrote about modernizing my blog’s infrastructure. Guess, what: Time to modernize again! Back then, I migrated from Drupal to a self-written, Jekyll-inspired static site generator written in Python (my current language of choice for most projects). I spent the majority of th…
A lot has happened since I changed my job more than 5 years ago.
I learned new stuff, met a lot of customers, blogged and podcasted (though on other platforms), and I didn’t get to give this blog much care.
The year 2011 is almost two weeks old, and by now you’ve probably read every other review/resolutions/plans blog post out there. Now you have time to read this one :).
But first of all: Apologies for not having blogged for weeks. I’ve been moving to a new home over the last two months, the holiday season took its toll and there were a few other personal and job projects that demanded my attention.
Now, normality (whatever it is) is starting to come back and I can start devoting more time to this blog again.
This blog is now one year old, although I had been blogging for more than five years before. Time to reflect, plan and flip some switches for the future.
Here’s a quick recap of 2010, some plans and ideas for this blog, a call for feedback and hints to some other projects for 2011.
For my last article, I wanted to include a couple of videos from YouTube.
First, I pondered using the standard YouTube embed code, but I wanted a more simple, elegant solution. The Drupal RepTags module supports powerful macros and it comes with some pre-built YouTube macros, so that wasn’t bad.
But I wanted more: HTML5. Read on and see how easily you can create your own Drupal RepTags, including the code I use to add HTML5 support for the Drupal YouTube RepTag.
Darren from ProBlogger today posted his 7 Link Challenge. A fun idea in which he asks bloggers to share 7 links to posts, based on the 7 criteria he selected.
ProBlogger is a great website with lots of useful tips for bloggers. Even if you don’t plan to make money with your blog, or if you don’t think of yourself as a pro blogger, this site is still one of the best in terms of blogging advice.
I’m currently reading his book “ProBlogger” (affiliate link) and I can highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking more seriously about blogging.
Now, let’s get started with the ProBlogger 7 Link Challenge for Constant Thinking:
One of the web 2.0 startup hypes du jour is called Flattr. It’s a micro-payment service that enables readers to allocate a monthly budget they can use to “flattr” blog posts and other content by clicking a simple badge. The monthly flat-rate is then distributed to the “flattred” authors as a way of appreciation.
More on that in this short video.
A lot of people are jumping on the Flattr bandwagon, and of course, rewarding creators is always goodness.
But I’m not convinced.
Why? Because IMHO there’s no need for a middle man handling the “Thank You” transaction between a blogger (or other content creator) and the reader (or other content consumer).
Instead, here are ten (10) better ways to accomplish the same thing (supporting your favorite creator). They can involve money or not - you choose - and in each of them, everybody wins.
Over the weekend, I redesigned the theme of my blog. I hope you like the result!
While I’m not a web design nor a theming expert, it was still quite easy to find a nice theme, and apply some blog-friendly customizations to it. Here are a few tips to get you started in Drupal theming:
Yesterday, I had two hours in a cafe, a Cappuccino on my table, a piece of lemon cake and free WLAN. “Cool”, I thought, “I’ll write an entry for my blog!”. How romantic. Right after I entered my blog user’s password, it dawned on me: The connection to my blog wasn’t encrypted! Anyone able to sniff on the local WLAN would have been able to catch my password as I entered it and steal my blog user ID! It took me some time (slightly more than the 2 hours I had…) to figure this out, so here’s a howto on how to make your login/admin tasks secure for a Drupal instance running on Strato as the hoster.
When creating this blog, I faced the question of what blogging platform to use: Hosted blogging, Wordpress or one of the many CMS systems out there? Here’s a discussion about blogging options and why I chose Drupal as my platform of choice, plus a couple of really useful resources that helped me tailor it to my blogging needs.
Dear reader, my name is Constantin Gonzalez, and welcome to Constant Thinking!
This blog is about useful technology for the quality geek. As the name implies, I’m constantly thinking about technology, trying to figure out where it leads to, and how to get the best out of it. I try to learn, create and share useful technology stuff every day.
I’ve been playing with computers since the early 80’s, and with Unix and the Internet since the early 90’s. I’ve created and installed websites since 1994, started working for Sun Microsystems in 1998 and as of now, I’m now a Principal Field Technologist at Oracle through their acquisition of Sun. My job is to provide Technical Expertise to customers in Germany, and help with other customer projects in rest of the world. My focus areas are SPARC processors and systems, Solaris and Cloud Computing.
