I wanted to get an understanding of what opening meant to businesses around Dallas. Were they opening? What precautions were they taking? Were employees in safe environments? And bigger picture, I wanted to know if these are places that I would feel safe taking my family to.

The numbers reported by Mark’s research are as fascinating as they are hair curling. Of the roughly 1,000 businesses surveyed, “only 36% of businesses chose to open on the opening weekend,” which I found encouraging. “Wow, Dallas really approached this responsibly and only a little over a third of businesses felt they could manage opening safely,” I thought. I continued reading.

Of those who chose to open “96% of businesses were non-compliant across all mandatory protocols and all locations.” Mark breaks this down further by explaining that only ~1/3 businesses were 50% compliant and of the protocols, “~60% of mandatory protocols were followed and ~54% of all suggested protocols were followed.”

I was encouraged when I read the first stat that only 36% of businesses opened as I assumed that meant only businesses who planned to comply with the mandatory protocols would be willing to risk opening and the remaining 64% were simply unable to open safely. However the stats pertaining to compliance suggest that when businesses in Canada open up, we cannot be assured that they are doing so because they are ready to implement protocols to protect their customers. It remains our individual responsibility to observe the appropriate protocols when participating in public commerce.

All of this said, I do not think Dallas or any other area was wrong to open. Businesses who failed to comply with protocols during opening weekend will surely improve now that we have the data. For the sake of employees and customers, I hope they are able to make those improvements quickly.

I’m a website. I’ll be gone soon, and that’s okay.

You can send me messages using the form below. If I go 24 hours without receiving a message, I’ll permanently self-destruct, and everything will be wiped from my database.

A hilarious yet beautiful concept for a website. Really nice design, too.

via Kottke

I’ve pushed a few minor updates to my site this week.

1. I played around with the inertia of the scrolling animation on the homepage to behave better on larger screens.
2. I’ve worked out how to group posts by day and to sort posts within a day from oldest-to-newest (while days continue to be presented newest-to-oldest). The intention with this change is to make reading through a day’s posts feel more natural, as often on days when I do publish more than one post, they are often connected in some way. If there’s interest, I might write up a post about how I accomplished this.
3. I’ve refined how I’m handling dark mode on the site. Instead of creating separate style sheets for each theme and swapping out the link rel="stylesheet" tag for each theme, I’m now using CSS Variables and setting a data-theme attribute on the HTML element. Switching between themes now feels instantaneous.
4. I’ve removed the lazy loading for images. While lazy loading makes for faster loading speeds, it also means that people who don’t have JavaScript enabled can’t see any images. I decided the minor cost of speed is worth the improvement to accessibility.
5. Less important to you than me, I cut the time it takes for this site to build by more than 50%. I did this by removing some unused code and reducing the number of include tags in the default.html template that is used to generate every single page of this site. What once took anywhere from 20–30 seconds to build is now taking 8–9 seconds which makes iterating and publishing new changes so much more enjoyable.

On an unrelated note, this post and the post from earlier today were both scheduled using Alex Johnson’s excellent Heroku Scheduler job for scheduling Jekyll posts. Unfortunately, I’m still using my multi-app setup for publishing posts from my phone though I do intend to dig into IndieKit by Paul Robert Loyd which I was introduced to by Boris as a way of setting up a Micropub endpoint on Heroku. Still have to work my way through some configuration before that’s ready to go.

When I read Manton Reece’s announcement that the Micro.blog apps would be swapping out Avenir for default system fonts, I wanted to see what a redesigned landing page designed with Apple’s San Francisco font would look like. This design was not solicited by nor has it been shown to anyone on the Micro.blog team.

The idea for the photo in the header would be to solicit photos of Micro.blog community members holding a device displaying their blog. The photo would change on each page refresh to promote the diversity that makes up the Micro.blog community.

The rest of the content has been left as-is or with minimal editing for clarity and effect.

Would love to hear what you think 😊