Weeknotes 25:43

October 26, 2025

Week of October 19–25

• I got stumped by an issue on Monday. Our site uses Glide to power our carousels. The layout of a carousel on a specific page was off. It was worse when you resized the browser. It seemed like the issue was related to some inline styles that I saw in the code. But I could not figure out where it was coming from. It was not in the page template. It was not until I was talking to my team leader that I figured out out the code was coming from a “plugin” (Django CMS equivalent of a WordPress block). Plugin code will override the content in the template (because the template has a conditional that makes that happen). It looked like someone had copied code where Glide was applying those inline styles and pasted into the plugin. Once I cleaned up the code, it fixed the layout problem. I am still getting tripped up on where things come from in Django CMS.
• I was frustrated by the lack of text formatting tools in Thinkific. Thinkific is a course platform that we are using for an online ministry training course at the beginning of next year. I had been tasked to clean up the course introduction page. I also did not like that you could not make adjustments to the hero image. The height of the hero had a maximum set and the image would scale for larger screens. I had incorporated some text in the image and had to rethink it based on the limitations of the platform.
• It felt like a very unproductive week. My load has been a little lighter recently as I am waiting for some big things to come down the pike. I felt very tired this week and unmotivated. I believe some of it was tied to allergies and the weather. I had several low energy days where it was hard to get going. I had wanted to use my margin to watch videos in the Unleash the power of Scroll-Driven Animations course. But I had trouble staying awake. I am hoping I have more energy next week.
• I decided to play around more with scroll animations and to see if I could replicate something I had built using GSAP last year. It was a simple use case of making content scale up and back down on scroll. I was able to replicate the animations with CSS. But then I decided to apply what I had learned from Cyd Stumpel’s article, Two approaches to fallback CSS scroll driven animations. I decided to add the GSAP script back into the solution as a fallback for browsers that don’t yet support CSS scroll-driven animations (looking at you Firefox). You can see my work on Codepen.

Caught my eye

Lando Norris site – I could tell that this site was using GSAP as soon as I started scrolling. It made me wonder if there is a way to do “pinning” similar to GSAP with CSS scroll-driven animations. I did a little bit of research and it does look like there are some ways to do it using position:sticky and view() timelines. I am hoping to prototype something next week.

What I wrote

Október 23 – My personal reflections on October 23, Republic Day celebrated in Hungary. Including some pictures from different trips I have taken to Budapest.

Articles I read

• 10 Ways To Keep Your Reading Fresh (Tim Challies)
• Copy the Leader: Dave Holtzman (KU Alumni)
• Resist the Machine (Darryl Dash)
• No Guarantee of Life and Vigor (Tim Challies)
• Plates (Chris Coyier)
• The Two Button Problem (Chris Coyier on Frontend Masters Blog)
• AI Browsers, ad nauseam (Tyler Sticka)
• Vibe Check Number 40 (Dave Rupert)
• View Transitions: The Smooth Parts (Matthias Ott)
• ChatGPT Atlas isn’t competing against other browsers (Stephanie Stimac)
• Yes, let’s teach LLMs accessibility, but also the companies using them (Hidde de Vries)
• Total Entertainment Forever (Geoff Graham)
• Challenge (Matthias Ott) – I enjoyed this perspective about being willing to challenge your own assumption by listening to and taking feedback.
• Trump Is Dragging Us Down to His Level (David French in the New York Times)
• Write Code That Runs in the Browser, or Write Code the Browser Runs (Jim Nielsen)
• Decreation (T. M. Suffield)
• Designing Amiable Web Spaces: Lessons from Vienna’s Café Culture (Mark Bernstein on A List Apart) – This article was a little too heady for me. Not as practical as I expected.
• Browsing with assistive technology videos (TetraLogical) – I watched through these videos on Friday. Really good content.
• The Benefit of Boring Television (Tim Challies)
• Quick October Update (Jonathan Snook)
• AI Browsers: Living on the Frontier of Security (Jim Nielsen)
• Junior Dev Tip: “Scroll Up” (Alex Party)
• Studio Notes #55 (Dan Cederholm) – I loved Dan’s story about the mailbox. I think you made the wise call Dan. I am tempted by the Maclock. I married into a Mac Classic computer.

What I watched

• Watson (Paramount+)
• Matlock (Paramout+)
• Strange New Worlds (Paramount+)
• The Voice (NBC)
• Over The Garden Wall (DVD)
• Add Scroll Shadows to a Scroll Container | Unleash the power of Scroll-Driven Animations Lesson 6 (YouTube)
• The Great British Baking Show Collection 13, Episodes 7 (Netflix)
• 2015 World Series Film Royals Documentary (YouTube) – I enjoyed reliving the Royals championsip from 10 years ago.
• Battlestar Galactica (1978) 15 Weird Facts You Didn’t Know (YouTube) – I was a fan of the original series and had the toys that shot missiles. I still have a Viper on my bookshelf.

What I listened to

• Making the web more whimsical with Sara Joy (General Musings with Kevin Powell) – I listened to about half of this episode.
• Living the Dream: Dan Cederholm’s Creative Journey (Part 1) (Podcast Awesome)
• Shop Talk Show #687 – Ben Frain on Responsive Design
• A Liturgy, A Legacy, & The Songs of Rich Mullins (Andrew Peterson and friends) – I was a fan of Rich’s music and enjoyed this tribute album that was released this week on Rich’s birthday.

Books I am reading

• Sunday Matters (Paul David Tripp) – I read one devotional a week.
• Everyday Gospel (Paul David Tripp) – Reading through the Bible this year with this devotional.
• All That Jesus Commanded (John Piper)
• Faithfully Present (Adam Ramsey)

Walking

• Sunday – 4.1 miles in 1 hour and 18 minutes
• Tuesday – 3.06 in 58 minutes
• Saturday – 4.24 miles in 1 hour and 18 minutes

What I played

MLB The Show 20 (Twins) – I went 1-2 dropping a two game series to the WhiteSox.