A stream of consciousness by Laurence Hughes

I’ve recently been updating my website over a series of nights and weekends. The changes aren’t very noticeable to the eye; they mostly involved modernising and streamlining back-end features and technology, plus some improvements to accessibility and performance. I’m really happy to have made them!

About a year ago I wrote about the features I wanted on my personal website versus those it had. The work I’ve been doing recently has helped to plug the gaps.

During this work I documented the latest features of my website on the readme of my public website repository. I find it really useful to be able to see this information at a glance. It’ll also make life much easier when I want to tweak things in the future.

Here’s what the Features section of my readme currently says:

• Statically generated, fast loading pages using Eleventy
• Hosted with Netlify
• Focused on accessibility, performance and web good practices (100/100 scores for all on Lighthouse)
• Supports draft posts that are skipped in production builds using 11ty’s Preprocessor API
• Raw image to modern image conversion via Eleventy Image plugin: converts formats; generates sizes; turns markdown img into the modern HTML for performant, responsive images
• Content editing via Decap CMS
• Search feature using PageFind and Zach Leatherman’s pagefind-search web component
• Contact form using Netlify Forms
• 404 page shown when necessary, thanks to Netlify’s custom 404 page handling
• Code block syntax highlighting via prism.js
• Supports deep-linking to headings via Zach Leatherman’s heading-anchors web component
• RSS feed using 11ty’s RSS plugin. I created a custom collection named feedPosts to let me control which posts are shared
• Tags page which lists all tags as links; plus “Posts tagged with x” pages
• Uses JavaScript modules for both client-side JS and on the server
• Pure modern CSS with no pre- or post- processing dependencies. Layers, native nesting, etc.
• Bundling (CSS and JS) via 11ty Bundle plugin
• Minification with cssnano
• Design Tokens defined in interoperable JSON then implemented as CSS custom properties (inspired by Heydon’s approach)
• Intrinsically responsive layouts inspired by Every Layout
• Fluid responsive type and spacing using Utopia
• Avatar available at a well-known location (Jim Nielsen’s idea)
• SEO: I provide an XML sitemap for search engines, and a human-readable sitemap

I’ve created a checklist called Website post-launch checklist which I can use after making updates. I’ve added this to my readme. (Perhaps in future I can automate some of the checklist tasks but for now manual is fine.)

I also want to do updates to 11ty and its plugins more regularly – I think that’ll be less painful. I have dependabot alerts turned on and I have also subscribed to the 11ty Blog’s feed in an effort to hear about upcoming changes.

I’ve added myself to 11ty’s community and am now listed as an Eleventy author. I hope that some day I’ll find that fuzzylogic.me has been added to 11ty’s Speedlify Leaderboard too – that’d be cool!

Danish composer and producer Marie Louise Buch’s LP from last year is on heavy rotation chez moi at the moment. It’s a chill but heartfelt mix of sun-drenched guitars, electronics and ML’s pure vocals that has elements of The Durutti Column and maybe even The Cocteau Twins… and it’s really hitting the spot for me.

Listen and buy on Bandcamp.

Somewhere is my current favourite track, but the whole album is great.

Thanks to Phillip H for the excellent recommendation. And I’m of course now jealous that I wasn’t a fan of ML in time to go to her Glasgow gig last year.

I didn’t have the appetite for Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel during the pandemic. I started it, but as the underlying sense of melancholy and “something bad around the corner” began to set in – just like it did in Never let me go – I realised I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for it. Cut to 2025 and it was time to give it another go.

I’d read before that Ishiguro is primarily interested in exploring what it is to be human, and uses science and technology elements as a device to support that. In Never let me go the device was cloning. In this book, the narrator is an “artificial friend” named Klara who is an AI-powered, empathetic android, and Ishiguro uses Klara’s unique perspective to shine a light on human behaviour and motivations.

I won’t attempt to properly review the book when others have done it much better. I’ll just say I really enjoyed it and recommend it.

Here are a few scrappy notes about themes I found interesting and jotted down.

• Scientific and technological advancements that present moral questions
• the idea of genetic editing (modification, I guess) to gain advantage, but with risks and side-effects. The gamble this represents.
• human loneliness
• blind faith/religion (which even Klara, as a rational machine, learned)
• Klara’s capacity for innocence, morality, contentment in a way that the humans seemed incapable of
• The idea that we can’t create identical clones of people because it’s not just their makeup that makes them unique; there’s also how others love and perceive them (which can’t be copied)
• the potential dark side-effects of our societal choices and technological advances: environment collapse and pollution; societal divisions (the father Paul’s armed community)

Clair bought me Jude Rogers’ book for Christmas thinking I would enjoy it – and I did. I love the idea of chronicling the milestones of your life using music – music that touched you, that you were obsessed with, or that bonded you with significant others.

I also enjoyed reading the science behind the feelings. As Jude asked in the first chapter:

How do songs affect our emotions so profoundly? How can they activate memories instantly?

It turns out that babies can recall what they heard while in the womb, and are predisposed to get music in a manner beyond advanced computers. The medial prefontal cortex – an area of the brain linked to our sense of self – is involved in tracking melodies. There are lots of these interesting insights.

Jude’s tunes ranged from Abba to Krafterk to Toots and the Maytals, which I found good fun. And as proof of music’s facility for time-travel, her final chapter on Prefab Sprout’s I trawl the megahertz transported me back instantly to my desk at Bright Signals’ office in 2018 during my contract there, where my friend Andy’s playlists introduced me to that unique tune.