Blogs Posts by Nick McHardy
Welcome to my blog, where I cover tech, games and whatever else that’s interesting in the universe like vinyl, fusion jazz and side projects.
This website is inspired by the web of the late 90s - no, not just the style of the site - but also harking back to a time when people would set up websites (probably on Geocities or similar) and write about anything that interested them. Most of the websites looked terrible (my first few sites were no exception) but it was so liberating having your own site. So here’s my modern-day version of that late 90s vibe.
Not sure where to start? Here are some blogs to get you started:
There’s also a 🍊 Garden Diary to check out. It’s sometimes updated as the seasons change.
Latest Posts
📅 Posted 2020-08-11
(11 minute read)
The web is rad. Well, it has been for a long time. But maybe the web is changing. As a user of a web browser, who spends a lot of time reading websites and publishing things on the web (maybe that few people read, ha!), these are my thoughts about the web as it is today.
I’ve been mucking around with the web since about 1996, when I built my first website with too much liberal use of Photoshop airbrush and a bit of Notepad. Some say I might’ve discovered Dreamweaver along the way too, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun as Netscape Communicator and super chisel-edged tables. The day I discovered server-side includes made the potential of avoiding frames in order to share a menu from one page to another was suddenly exciting! I’m in no way a thought leader in this space, but I can dabble with HTML, CSS, JS, random HTTP headers, the odd DNS record and how to build a serverless CMS using AWS and Hugo.
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📅 Posted 2020-06-30
(1 minute read)
I’ve launched a new feature on this site - which is basically a place for me to keep track of changes to our suburban garden.
The plan is to have things like:
- A catalogue of all plants in our garden
- Micro updates as things change… hopefully for the best (hoping not to share the passinig of plants which is sometimes inevitable)
- Links off to other sources to learn more about some of the plants we have
- Just basically an online place to share our garden with people!
So far, almost 100 plants are listed which is waaay more than I honestly thought we had packed into our tiny place called home.
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📅 Posted 2020-06-02
(4 minute read)
I was recently asked this very question and going with the “I might as well respond in blog form” strategy, here we are.
10 years ago now, I had a couple of “on the side” clients where I looked after their websites and some of their IT needs. I operated as a sole trader and didn’t really have a formal name, apart from my using own name.
This didn’t seem ideal.
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📅 Posted 2020-05-31
(12 minute read)
Recently I’ve been attending training sessions on what makes a great leader and what I (and the rest of my team) can do better to reach leadership nirvana. It’s a really positive exercise and frankly, the best training I’ve done in a long time.
We’ve been asked to keep a diary, which I’ve never been really that good at. Well, apart from this blog of course. But that’s a little different! I’m going to try and share as much as I think I can (and as much as I can remember) as well as put down some of the thoughts that I wrote down as I went along. Some of it will be difficult to share - I can’t read all of my handwriting!
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📅 Posted 2020-05-13
(3 minute read)
I recently added lazy loading to images on my blog, just to see if I could get the overall page load time down. I’ve tried to make sure my site is already pretty fast, but I’d like to see what other bit of juice I can squeeze out of the lemon, especially for slower connections.
You could do this with a custom shortcode, but that’s not fun because any existing image tag in content won’t be rendered with the appropriate markup.
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