It is said that Thomas Jefferson was such an inveterate tinker that Monticello was in a simultaneous state of being built while falling down.

Likewise this site.

Davidputney.com been in a continual state of repair and renovation since launch. (I’m sure you all noticed the new data-URI/local storage font loader.) My latest change, is a bit more public.

I swapped out the sans serif font Montserrat with another sans, Ginger. It’s a font I’d seen some time ago, but was reminded of it by one of my former colleagues.

Ginger and Montserrat are both geometric fonts, but Monserrat has a bit of a modern edge. Ginger has an Avant Garde-ish mid-20th Century feel, as if it should be in a Don Draper advertising campaign.

Ginger has a smaller x-height, – generally I don’t like fonts with small x-heights – so I had to do some further tweaking to get the scaling right. And by “right” I mean I’ll change it six more times this week.

Don’t worry, though. I did some cache busting to make sure it loads properly. If you don’t see the new font, I’ll gladly refund your money.

But, setting aesthetics aside, the addition of Ginger puts Davidputney.com® strongly “on brand” vis-a-vis my hair color and lack of ability to tan. And that’s what we do these days anyway, is build our personal brand on FaceTweet.

Marco Arment drew ire – and admiration – for his blog post arguing that Apple software had lost “the functional high ground.”

Arment isn’t a typical user – as a developer his view is somewhat more like a mechanic with a car up on a lift – not the person who drives it every day. His view may not be that of a typical user. In addition, he wrote later that he “looked back at what I wrote with regret, guilt, and embarrassment.” But further statements suggest he stands by his central idea that Apple software has not just some rough spots but some strikingly prominent bugs.

My experience with third-party iOS8 keyboards has convinced me he has a point. I’ve encountered bugs in keyboard implementation in much the same way as Johnny Rico encountered bugs in “Starship Troopers”. A conversation with a friend who has also had the same problems has convinced me I’m not an outlier.

Among the problems:

• The keyboard switches back to the iOS default keyboard at random.
• Occasionally no keyboard shows up at all. The only fix is to completely quit the app by swiping up in the application manager.
• Occasionally the keyboard appears turned 90 degrees clockwise and distorted in the top one-half of the app window.
• It’s easier to install Node.js using the OS X command line than to install an alternate keyboard in iOS 8. It also takes fewer steps.

Clearly Apple needs to hire Michael Ironside as senior vice president of growling “the only good bug is a dead bug.”

I’ve worked at newspapers since 1987.

Seems like every job that can be done at a paper, I’ve done at least once. I’ve been a reporter, copy editor and page designer.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be part of a team that created and launched a new daily newspaper. It started with an all-day secret skunkworks meeting in my apartment. I designed the paper from scratch, so I’ve had a rare chance to make a newspaper exactly how I wanted to make it.

I even paid for my first two years of college by working as a janitor – at a newspaper.

I’ve done pressroom preproduction of film and printing plates. Before that I did manual pasteup with hot wax and laser printed type.

During college I worked press late at night after all the designers and editors went home. I really was an ink-strained wretch by the end of the press run.

When drivers didn’t show up on a couple of occasions, I delivered newspapers. (Yes, we do aim for puddles.)

I was part of a team that installed and maintained a newsroom front-end system, so I’ve helped build the infrastructure that newsrooms use to produce newspapers.

I’ve done content, too. I spent several years as an online news producer, writing and updating breaking news. I shot and edited video. I’ve made interactive graphics and data visualizations, including a project that was a Pulitzer finalist.

This year I had the opportunity to be part of a newsroom that was rewarded a well-deserved Pulitzer.

Most recently, I designed and built three news sites from scratch and was working on a fourth this week.

Newspapers. Yeah, I’ve done that.

I’d been thinking about an exit from news for a long time.

For most of the 2000s I was a page designer at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va. It was a very good newspaper for its size. More importantly it was a lovely place to work.

Its editor had a “no assholes” policy. And he meant it.

Some had slipped through the screening – a photo editor who loved to bully people comes to mind – but the system tended to expel them because they never fit in. For a newspaper, it was strangely nondysfunctional place. In fact, it was a terrific place to work. I felt like I’d arrived just by being there.

We also could say, with pride, that there had never been layoffs in the paper’s 160-plus-year history. When I was recruiting people to work for Link, the newspaper startup I mentioned earlier, I would say “Don’t worry. They won’t just shut it down and fire you. They look after people here.”

But, in 2008, long traditions didn’t matter.

The newspaper had been put up for sale by the owner’s son. Layoffs were announced. Everyone I’d promised job security was fired and Link was shut down. About a dozen bright, talented folks from Link were sacked. I narrowly avoided the bloodbath.

I held the goodbye party – Irish wake, actually – at my place. I had a coffin in my living room. We poured one out. Sometime around 2 am, in the pouring rain, we drunkenly stole a Link news box from a corner near my house.

Even if Link was killed unceremoniously, it went out well.

In The Pilot newsroom, a dozen or more people were let go. It was traumatic. I attended three goodbye parties in one night, going from bar to bar with other coworkers making the farewell rounds.

We hoped that was all.

But it didn’t stop. We saw several rounds of cuts. What was once a newsroom of about 300 people was dwindling. I saw lots of good people exit. After a round of cuts late in 2014, it’s now half the size it once was.

The thing that stood out about so many pink-slipped friends was the haunted look and the question: “What am I going to do now?”

Few had resumes as varied as mine. Most had been a reporter or editor, sometimes for decades. These were experienced, smart people. In a newsroom, they were near the top of their industry. Outside the newsroom, they were fucked.

I didn’t want that to be me. I wanted to make sure that if the music ever stopped, that I had a chair.

When I was 15, I took a computer science class in high school. It was primitive by today’s standards. We had a classroom full of Apple ][ computers, and if I got there early enough I could get one of the good machines that could show 256 colors and 80 columns of text instead of 40.

We wrote programs in BASIC. In other words, lots of goto and gosub loops.

My favorite part of the class was the section in which we studied graphics. The assignment was to write a program that could draw lines between a point on an X axis with one on a Y. The result was something that looked like string art.

Even then, my inclination was that as soon as I grokked something that I would start working on variations of it. What if the lines could be random colors? What if it could keep drawing them endlessly? What if the points were random? I made a version that produced something like psychedelic pixie sticks crossed with Jackson Pollack.

It was my first foray into making art on computers – hardly Pixar quality, but still fun. It was also my entrance into the possibilities of computers. I should have known then I’d found what I really wanted to do. I made my first web site in 1998. I’ve had davidputney.com since 2000. My hobby was making websites long before it was my job.

I’ve spent decades circling back to this point. I’ve used computers for graphic design, sure, but for me it’s most natural to not just make the art but to make the thing that makes the art.

Turns out 15-year-old David actually knew what he wanted to do. It just took a while for me to figure it out.

It’s time.

I am leaving my job as a web designer at The Boston Globe and taking a job with a Cantina, a technology consulting company where I will help design and build web sites.

I’ve learned a lot in two years at The Globe and have had some amazing opportunities that have made this career move possible. I’ve met and worked with some wonderful, smart – even brilliant – people.

I’ve also learned there what I don’t want. The job took a lot out of me the past couple years.

I’m still trying to balance the good with the bad. But I will always be grateful for my time there, knowledge I gained and friends I met. I’ve recently found out how good of friends they really are. (Review: ***** Excellent. Would be friends with again.)

What lies ahead for me is exciting, but it’s also scary – oh boy it is. I’ve worked in newspapers since 1987. It isn’t all I know, but it’s certainly what I know.

I’m excited for what I stand to learn, also. Maybe that’s the trick to life: To not let fear of the unknown hold you back.

Several years ago I was struggling with a big life decision. I read an interview with director and screenwriter Brad Bird, who you may remember from such films as “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille” and “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.”

He said Pixar contacted him and asked him to come up to their Bay Area office to discuss writing and directing a film. Pixar had made an unprecedented string of hugely successful movies, not just financially but artistically. Although Bird’s sole feature “The Iron Giant” had been a moving, beloved film for some, it hadn’t exactly set the world on fire at the box office.

He said the prospect of going to Pixar was scary to even think about. He wrestled with the decision, just as I was with mine.

Then he realized that because he was so scared, that was exactly the reason he should go. It was what he needed to do.

Same here. Decision made. And on that bombshell, it’s time to end.

~30~

I’m like a caveman finding a new shiny pebble.

There’s nothing wrong with the old shiny pebble I’d been enamored with seconds ago, it’s just that … It’s new! Look how shiny it is!

I’ve been experimenting with various methods of cutting this site’s load time, particularly through asynchronously loading blocking files like webfonts and scripts.

I’d been using the Adobe/Google asynchronous font loader, but Adam Beres-Deak’s method became my latest new shiny pebble. His script loader limits the font palette to WOFF and WOFF2 files which have been encoded as base-64 data URIs into an @font-face stylesheet. This loads asynchronously, is added to the head of the page and is saved to local storage rather than being cached.

I use three faces and bold and italic variants of my body type, so it had the advantage of reducing font-related HTTP calls from five to one, even if my overall font file download size stayed roughly the same. I decided to implement it.

As they say on “Top Gear,” how hard can it be?

To create my CSS with data URIs I turned to FontSquirrel’s advanced settings. Subsetting and other cool stuff is available here in a UX that looks like the control panel of a 747.

I ran into problems with FontSquirrel’s base-64 converter, which consistently turns out a CSS file with no embedded base-64 data URIs for WOFF2 files.

A better option, and the one I ended up using, is the Gulp plugin cssBase64, although several other Gulp options are available. FontSquirrel-generated CSS takes a bit of editing to fix font names and properly assign weights and styles. Base-64 is as ugly as a Soviet tractor, so it’s best to not have to go into the output files anyway.

After a couple days of messing with this part in my spare time I had my font files in place. But it still wasn’t working properly due to a slapfight between Safari and Chrome over apparent differing opinions of cross-domain loading.

For various technical reasons I’ll not get into, I was using a full http link instead of a relative path for my font files. Safari treats http://davidputney.com … as cross domain and requires a www for fonts to load. Chrome treats http://www.davidputney.com as cross domain.

It took some time to nail down the problem, but I got it working in both browsers with a somewhat ugly CMS hack that – suddenly stares blankly off into the middle distance – I’ve seen things, man.”

Then my testing revealed another problem: It doesn’t work at all in Safari – desktop or mobile – in private browsing mode.

On the one hand, this site isn’t a porn site. Few will likely ever visit in private mode. But I use private mode on my phone and iPad almost exclusively to defeat site paywalls, so it’s pretty much broken for me on those devices.

I’d be less concerned about this if the effect on site speed wasn’t negligible. Overall load time and render speed are about 1 second faster. But first render is incrementally slower, about .2 to .3 seconds. This pushes first render from a less than a half second to closer to one second.

For most visitors less than a second load time feels immediate, but I’m going for glory on this. Data URIs in general aren’t all that fast. Faster methods appeal to me.

I spent enough time implementing this I want to leave it in place for at least a few days. I’ll weigh the benefits and decide then whether to stick with my new shiny pebble or go back to the old one.

It’s safe to say that 2014 was not a good year for me.

I got bogged down all summer and most of the fall in a hot mess of project at work. Friends were beset by problems. I spent most of the year depressed and deeply unhappy.

As far as I’m concerned, 2014 can just get the hell out of here and never come back. But, strangely, I wouldn’t take any of 2014 back.

It pushed me in important new directions both personally and professionally. I’m entering 2015 with a feeling that suddenly, unexpectedly everything is coming up Milhouse. I’m enjoying that moment.

Life doesn’t have a third act twist and a happy ending like movies and TV. Nothing I’m dealing with has been solved. But the random miseries of 2014 gave me enough clarity to tackle my bigger problems.

Friends came through for me in a big way. I’m still processing it all. I’m excited and scared.

A better 2015, maybe? Here’s hoping.

I think there’s a whale in that photo somewhere. That black dot. That’s it. Frankly, that photo doesn’t capture the moment well at all. Pretty much none of my photos from a recent vacation do.

It’s why sitting through someone’s vacation slides has become shorthand for “bored out of your mind” no matter what Don Draper says.

I was showing my pics to an – admittedly game – friend the other day on my phone. “Well, this doesn’t really do it justice,” I kept saying as I flipped between them. “Sorry.”

A 4.7-inch screen just doesn’t show the scale of a mountaintop sunrise, a mile above the clouds with a sprawling 12-mile-wide volcanic crater below.

“That cliff is about 100 feet tall,” I’d say, showing a photo of a waterfall that looked more like a backyard koi pond.

“And those breakers are 25 to 30 feet tall,” I’d say, trying to clarify that they may look like ripples but they really are huge waves.

I recently saw a stat that more photos are taken in a month than in the entire first 100 years of photography. About a trillion this year. At best photos are poor synecdoche our experiences.

The general unworthiness of photos first hit me a few years ago during what could only be called a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a dorky civilian like me. I was on the deck of the aircraft carrier Eisenhower about 10 yards from F/A Hornets blasting off.

It’s impossible really to fully describe it, the jet fuel smell, the noise, the crew rushing around, the facefull of afterburner blast that could melt paint off a car. And hanging over it all was the feeling that if anything went wrong, chances of survival were somewhere around zero.

I realized I was mainly concerned with getting video. I would never get to experience this exact moment again, so I put my camera away and watched.

I have video of the scene, but as video of carrier takeoffs goes, it’s not all that good. At max, it proves I was there.

I find myself putting away my camera a lot. Passengers on my whale-watching trip rushed from railing to railing to shoot pics, but I stood on the bow enjoying a warm breeze and tropical blue water while whales repeatedly breached and slapped their tails.

I shot subpar video of the Nakalele Blowhole but I spent most my time watching it explode in a column of spray over and over. Top tip: Stand upwind or you end up with blowhole all over you. That, or bring a towel.

Red Sand Beach in Hana is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. The sheer cliffs, the rainforest, the red sand, the natural breakwater. I arrived at the golden hour and it was simply breathtaking. My photos of it are terrible.

That’s why I don’t vacation through a viewfinder.

Great moments are here and evaporate. Best to enjoy them and let them go.

I’ve never been warned that I would die so many times in a single week.

Here’s the text of a typical warning sign I saw during a trip to Maui.

Warning Stay Clear of Blowhole. You can be sucked in and killed. It’s Not a WaterPark.

In this case it was hand-scrawled on a weathered green piece of plywood up the hill from the Nakalele Blowhole. To get to the blowhole, visitors clamber over boulders the size of a car, down a path made slick and muddy by the light rain that was falling, along the edge of a cliff to finally view the geyser-like sight.

If that’s not enough of a death sport, visitors could walk right up to the blowhole and stick their head into it. If they wanted to, you know, die.

That’s pretty much how most of the amazing sites on the island are: Hard to find, and once you get there, potentially lethal. Want to tour a lava tube? Pay $12, get a flashlight and then the guide points toward a hole in the ground.

Want to see a spectacular waterfall? Climb down a slippery, homemade ladder, across boulders the size of a sofa, cling to a muddy path along the stream and then stumble and bumble 50 yards down a streambed filled with slimy, round rocks.

It’s a marked change from the swaddling over-security of Boston, where they seem to make up dangers just some they can pass laws against them. Warning: The cranberry nut muffins might contain nuts.

If Maui was somehow relocated to Boston, the blowhole would have a ramp, an elevator, walkways, canopies, lighting, signage and railings. No one would be allowed to approach it until listening to a safety lecture and donning protective gear.

Warning: Seawater in the blowhole may contain salt. Those on a low-sodium diet are advised to stand upwind.

Things that make life safer make nature worse. And the whole point is enjoying nature.

If Christopher Nolan’s movies are anything they are grounded.

His breakthrough Memento is a time travel movie with no actual time travel. His Batman trilogy stripped away Tim Burton’s gothic operatics to create bleeding, bruised Caped Crusader confronting a terrorist siege.

And The Prestige – which I call “Batman vs. Wolverine, With Magic” – doesn’t contain magic or mysticism, just stagecraft, misdirection and technology.

Nolan’s literalism has led some critics to ding his movies for lacking “poetry,” and rightly so. Still, the Batman trilogy remains intriguing and unique, in part, because Nolan seemingly had to understand the superhero in literal terms to make a movie about him.

Nolan’s literalism also gives him a tendency toward flat-footed and overly expository dialogue. His movies always come with a clearly voiced thesis statements, such as The Dark Knight’s “You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain” or the wonderfully memeable “Some men just want to watch the world burn”

Matthew McConaughey growls “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” That seems a usable enough premise for a great sci-fi movie.

Interstellar certainly seemed promising, if not downright thrilling in its potential. Film’s grounded literalist was basically getting all the money and making a space movie. After Nolan’s successes, he could clearly do what he wanted.

Top theoretical physicists were consulted to make sure the special effects were scientifically accurate, not just pretty. And they are both. The black hole Gargantua makes for a looming, silent cinematic presence while being so accurate that a scientific paper was written about discoveries made during its creation.

Everything suggested the movie would be a literal look at man’s expansion into space. Who couldn’t watch the teaser with its highlight reel of spaceflight achievements and not get excited. Or, less promisingly, be reminded of the Star Trek: Enterprise opening credits.

Turns out, however, Interstellar ended up with a competing thesis statement, found in Anne Hathaway’s “love is the most powerful force in nature” soliloquy.

Physics, meet metaphysics. Again.

Science fiction dominates movies, but hard sci-fi is a rare treat. We get, what, one or two per decade? Yet the mark of “serious” sci-fi is to wander off into religious allegory, with some scene of the protagonist floating around in a glowey white space heaven as orchestral music swells.

You find that theme in most serious, ambitious sci-fi movies. 2001: A Space Odyssey works quite well as Christian allegory. Mankind is awakened to his potential by an unseen higher power who eventually helps Dave Bowman throw off physical constraints and concerns as a transcendent being.

Contact – whose bravura opening shot weds science and cinematic wonder for one of the most beautiful sequences in all of sci-fi – uses science to transport Ellie Arroway across the galaxy. But only faith allows her to accept alien visitation in the form of her beloved father in a tropical alien afterlife.

In Gravity, broadcasting “in the clear” is a form of prayer that give Ryan Stone strength to achieve physical survival and spiritual renewal.

When Star Trek went the big-ideas route in the ill-fated Star Trek: The Motion Picture the producers hired 2001’s Douglas Trumbull for the special effects and sent the crew off on a search for God and meaning. The crew met God again in Star Trek V but it turned out less well for God as he failed to meet Shatner’s standards and was killed.

Interstellar has its own big-ideas religious themes to unpack. The more obvious is the Christ analogy of McConaughey’s Cooper leaving earth with a promise to return and save humanity from destruction. A black hole serves as a celestial Pearly Gates that instead of horribly killing Cooper, it sends him into the Space Library of Congress to create the movie’s bootstrap paradox.

Or maybe higher beings save him. Or super-advanced humans. It’s confusing that way.

Including all this religiosity doesn’t necessarily make for a bad sci-fi story.

These movies are just the stories we like to create and to tell and the ideas we grapple with. Most people know that Joseph Campbell formulated the idea of cross-cultural themes after George Lucas popularized the idea with Star Wars.

Lucas was savvy enough to throw in some quasi-religon sorcerer’s ways into “Star Wars” to keep things mythic.

But religious allegory has become the go-to sci-fi story. Coldly atheistic Alien was transubstantiated into a quest to find our creator in the muddled Prometheus, presumedly so the story could be “more meaningful.”

Humans are tiny and fragile compared with the scale and brutality of the universe, a theme Interstellar handles well. The human reaction to our smallness is to conjure up gods with the power to control what’s beyond our grasp.

Creating distant benevolent entity playing to our better natures and saving humanity with technology indistinguishable from magic is just inventing God out of science and reason.

Like so many in sci-fi, Nolan seemed unwilling to send his characters out into a godless and barren universe filled with discovery, fact and reason, toward the kind of movie he seemed so suited to make.

One of the first things I noticed about iOS8 was that the default underscore style for anchor tags is a proper typographical underline.

Safari in Yosemite has also adopted this method.

These are nice touches that draw the traditions of print typography and the type of sanding-the-bottoms-of-the drawers attention to detail that websites need.

But the state of default browser underlines remains fairly lousy across the board. In an era when more refined web type is common, it’s particularly bothersome for typographical pedants.

When building Cruxnow.com, I adopted the Medium design team’s method of creating bespoke underlines. If you want to know how it looks – well, as Madge the sassy manicurist would say, you’re soaking in it. The underscores on this site use a more refined version of it.

Like many methods in CSS, it’s a clever-yet-hideous hack that uses a background gradient to mimic a typographical underline.

I’ve created a SASS mixin that automagically creates the background gradient. You pass it an argument for the color and top position for the underscore, the latter expressed as percentage.

    @mixin underscore ($color, $position)
  {
  color:$color;
  background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(top, transparent 75%, $hover_color 75%);
  background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, transparent 75%, $hover_color 75%);
  background-image: -o-linear-gradient(top, transparent 75%, $hover_color 75%);
  background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, transparent 75%, $hover_color 75%);
  background-size: 2px 2px;
  background-origin: padding-box;
  background-position: 0 $position;
  background-repeat: repeat-x;
  text-shadow:1px 1px 0px white, -1px 1px 0px white ;
  }

Like most hacky CSS fixes, it’s not really fire and forget. You’ll probably have to counteract its effects in some other declarations.

A few tips: It’s span level, so if you wrap an anchor tag around a block of items it won’t work properly. You also have to apply the mixin for a hover state. The text shadow is white, so if you use it over a color background, it may cause issues.

It also doesn’t work in – wait for it – IE8 or <, so you’ll have to fall back to the browser default. But then again, people who still use IE8 don’t deserve nice things anyway.

I’ve been writing about my efforts to make my site load faster. Read Part 1 here.

But like that young Jedi so long ago, I was not always able to levitate the ship out of the swamp. Probably because I didn’t believe enough.

Either, way, here are some methods that I tried and ended up not using.

###What was a wash

• Lazy loading or concatenating my javascript and didn’t make much of a difference. Likely because my concatenated scripts are only 18K.
• Paying extra for CDN web hosting. My time to first byte varies widely, from as low as .2 seconds to sometimes more than .7 seconds. My non-CDN hosting on another account is just as fast or faster. Didn’t seem to be worth the extra money.
• Responsive images with Picturefill 2. It reduces page weight for mobile devices, but didn’t speed load times appreciably. Creating images of multiple sizes of the various photo shapes for dozens of images was a huge pain, even with a Gulp task/ImageMagick doing most of the hard work. Absolutely a must have for any site, but it won’t make you faster.

###What didn’t work

• Inline data URIs not only didn’t work, they really didn’t work. I tried inline data URIs for my hero images in an effort to cut HTTP calls for above-the-fold page content. In short: Browsers are optimized for common tasks such as grabbing images off a server and rendering them as fast as possible. Data URIs, not so much.
• Image compression I used the double-size low-res JPEG technique for images. It cut my page weight but I needed to start with billboard-sized images and they still ended up looking overcompressed. Also, if you do this Google Page Speed Insights will falsely accuse of not optimizing and compressing your images.
• Lazyloading images Picturefill 2 was still new enough when I built my site that this was always going to be a problem. I tried LazySizes which claims to be compatible, but its main effect was to kill my page load times. Your experience may be different, but I’d advise some testing first.
• Asynchronous loading of concatenated scripts broke Tappy.js. I need to look into this further, but haven’t had time.
• Minifiying HTML saved about 20K overall. But my CMS uses custom tags for content, and the minifier broke them.

###Takeaways

• Modularize all the things The trend on every project I’ve tackled has been to make it more modular. SASS obviously makes this simpler with CSS files and partials. I’ve been using Codekit to modularize my pages but you can use Gulp, Grunt or other methods.
• Experiment Speed gains seemed to be in the details for me and seemed to vary from other people’s. Every site is a little bit different.
• Gulp and CodeKit FTW Or use Grunt, if that’s your bag. Either way task runners make an enormous difference.
• Lazy load any blocking files that you can.
• Yeah, and fonts too. A blank page waiting for a font to load is worse that flash of unstyled text.
• Give up some image quality to reduce page weight.
• Latency slows your page more than page weight, so your efforts should concentrate on optimizing for that.
• Start render times are important that total load times (although these should be low, too) because that’s what the user sees.
• There’s no magic bullet to speed a page. It’s cumulative and achieved by trimming tenths of a second here and there.