Projects

I started redesigning this site in January of 2020. Remember January of 2020? We didn’t know we were living in the Before Times. There were still a few people in the White House who weren’t Fox News hosts or meme coin shills or raw milk evangelists. Our tech bro billionaires hadn’t yet entered the endgame of their persistent campaign to annihilate whatever sense of objective reality we once shared. We were so young.

I wouldn’t… See more →

I was hopeful, if not naive enough to be confident, that enough people were sufficiently fed up with That Fucking Guy to keep him from returning to the White House. But he will, of course, be returning, and while this time his victory isn’t the shock to the system it was in 2016, his popular vote win, a hair shy of a mandate, still stings plenty. The Democratic Party’s subsequent soul-searching might be morbidly comical… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me.

This year I seem to be nostalgic for the age of Satanic panic, as I’ll be doing concurrent, chronological deep dives on The Exorcist and The Omen, two… See more →

From the beginning, it was clear that data migration was going to be this redesign’s biggest, most cumbersome task, as the site was growing from 600-some blog posts to untold thousands. I assumed that reformatting the mountain of data arriving in disparate configurations from over a dozen external sources (as described in my previous post) would be the lion’s share of the work, and it would be smooth sailing from there. How wrong I was!… See more →

I’ve done a lot of work on the site in the last two months, and a launch date, while still a ways off, is finally coming into focus. I’ve been working on this redesign very intermittently for over four years now, but at this point I expect to keep at it until it’s done, with as little interruption as possible.

Among other recent advances, I’ve moved the site from Jekyll to Eleventy, chosen a font… See more →

This is the long story of a frivolous, fleeting creative project that came out of nowhere, completely took over my life for a few weeks, and was gone as quickly as it came. Let it be known that I regret none of it!

I’m a proud member of the Philadelphia Psychotronic Film Society. In the organization’s own words:

We carry on the proud tradition set forth by Psychotronic Film Societies around the globe by screening… See more →

I’ll begin by briefly weighing in on five of the most prominent pieces of the 2023 zeitgeist, at least from where I was sitting. Some cynical vibes ahead, so feel free to skip past this part if you’re not in the mood for negative energy:

• Taylor Swift: Gen Z’s version of Beatlemania is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, since I find Taylor Swift’s music to be entirely unremarkable, but that didn’t stop her… See more →

Late last year, my friend Jon (without an h) told me his high school buddy John (with an h) was putting together a band to play Misfits and Danzig tunes for Porchella, the annual Halloween band crawl in Irvington, the town in New York’s Hudson Valley where John lives. John on drums and Jon on guitar. Did I want in? As anyone who has ever spent more than five seconds with me knows, fronting a… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me.

I’ll often use this month as an opportunity to catch up on a franchise, and this year, for reasons surpassing understanding, the new, tenth installment of the Saw… See more →

I’ve been revising a metadata structure for blog posts and a sitemap for a few months now, and since I haven’t felt the need to tweak either of them in awhile, they’re probably solid enough to document here.

Metadata structure

The blog post metadata has been developed to accommodate a wide variety of post types, to give me a lot of flexibility in how to present them, and to give users a lot of options… See more →

In my previous post, I mentioned Tinnitus Tracker, my standalone concert diary site which can be browsed by genre, artist, venue, city, state, and year. I had been planning to continue updating that site concurrently with V7, but it recently occurred to me that it makes a lot more sense to just consolidate the two sites, which in hindsight seems incredibly obvious.

For one thing, I’ve never been satisfied with the Tinnitus Tracker design, and… See more →

Every static site generator has idiosyncrasies, and Eleventy is no different. As is the case pretty much any time I try out software, I find that Eleventy often does things differently than I think it ought to, and it doesn’t always make itself as clear as I think it could. A couple of examples:

• Eleventy has no built-in mechanism for date-based archives. A common blogging convention I’ve adhered to for many years involves organizing post… See more →

I’ve given my V7 redesign project the unofficial tagline “The Procrastination Destination” since the significant progress it’s seen in the past few months has come mostly in stolen moments, some of which turned into extremely productive (and perhaps troublingly obsessive) deep dives. This recent movement has been pretty non-linear, and the tasks in play are all interdependent enough that none of them are really done until all of them are, but I seem to be… See more →

• Translated from the JavaScript in Sean Yen’s Easing equations
• Illustrations adapted from Andrey Sitnik and Ivan Solovev’s Easings.net

Example usage:

duration = 30
for frame in range(duration):
    return easeInOutQuad(frame/duration)

linear

def linear(t):
    return t

easeInSine

def easeInSine(t):
    import math
    return -math.cos(t * math.pi / 2) + 1

easeOutSine

def easeOutSine(t):
    import math
    return math.sin(t * math.pi / 2)

easeInOutSine

def easeInOutSine(t):
    import math
    return -(math.cos(math.pi * t) - 1) / 2

easeInQuad

def easeInQuad(t):
    return t * t

easeOutQuad

def easeOutQuad(t):
    return -t * (t - 2)

easeInOutQuad

def easeInOutQuad(t):
    t *= 2
    if t < 1:
        return t * t / 2
    else:
        t … See more →

Maude

Leah and I became dog parents early in 2022, adopting a 15-pound, two-year-old Jack Russell / Chihuahua mix. Knowing Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned, we named her Maude, after the Bea Arthur character, who in 1972 was the first sitcom character to have an abortion. Living with Maude has been a big adjustment, but after getting over the initial hump, I’m not sure how we ever lived without her. She loves belly… See more →

It’s been nearly two years since I posted an update on this project! I’ve been moving it forward slowly and quietly since then, and I’ll share some details about those activities in due time, as well as details about how work and life changes have introduced new and different demands on my time and somewhat expanded the scope of the site. But for now, the most important takeaway is that my fundamental vision for V7… See more →

Happy Halloween! Here are a few quick notes about this year’s design for Robtober, my annual horror movie marathon.

The ransom letters

The ransom note concept for the title screen came to me in the middle of the night, and I don’t remember if it was inspired by something specific. But in my subsequent research, I read the entire Wikipedia article about the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, so if that’s a knowledge hole your pub… See more →

Every October, I broaden my cinematic horizons by putting together a big schedule of horror movies I haven’t seen yet. Alas, this year’s plans have been upended by my abduction, and for some reason, my mysterious captors aren’t interested in money. Instead, their ransom demand is that people watch the movies I’ve scheduled. These dudes seem like they mean business, so if you can help me out, I’d really appreciate it. But if you’re too… See more →

Editorial design is a many-splendored thing. Cliché as it may be to say a picture is worth a thousand words, there’s no denying that even the most skillful and vivid deployment of the written word can benefit from a thoughtful visual presentation. Photography, illustration and video can humanize a story’s characters. Charts, graphs and other data visualizations clarify complicated concepts. Typography and color set an emotional tone. And bringing cohesive form to it all is… See more →

Let me begin by saying I promise this post is mostly good vibes. Skip ahead if you like, but if you’ll momentarily indulge my pessimism: What a stupid time to be alive.

2021 was supposed to be the year the vaccine gave us our lives back, and while it did for some of us to some degree, its international distribution predictably favored wealthy nations, and the long-simmering anti-vax movement here in the wealthiest nation of… See more →

Robtober is what I call the horror movie binge I do every October. After I redesigned my site in 2017, I started documenting the event each year with a horrifically custom-designed blog post, getting a little more elaborate each time. This post goes behind the scenes of the 2021 edition.

The data

I generate my site with Jekyll, and a custom-designed post like Robtober gets its own unique layout file. To keep things tidy, all the… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me.

This year’s batch is a little less focused than usual, drawn from new releases, repertory screenings in Philadelphia, recent additions to Time Out’s “100 Best Horror Films,” Criterion… See more →

Apropos of nothing, I decided that the first of the old entries I’d bring over to V7 would be granular ones:

• Daily Haiku: A section of the fourth version of my site, beginning back in 2005. As the name suggests, I wrote a haiku every weekday based on the Dictionary.com Word of the Day. Each haiku was originally its own entry, but when I brought them over to V6 a few years ago, I consolidated… See more →

I began last year’s “That Was 2019” post by expressing disappointment in my immune system’s poor performance that year, so let me begin this year’s wrap-up by praising that same immune system’s effectiveness in 2020. More than 1.8 million people died of COVID-19 in 2020, a disproportionately high 340,000 of them Americans, and I didn’t get so much as a head cold. I spent much of the year being grateful for my health and financial… See more →

For awhile, I had basically resigned myself to the idea that the massive amount of stray content I’m planning to bring home (thousands of tweets, Flickr photos, etc) would necessitate moving my site onto a LAMP stack CMS. I started poking around in WordPress, which I hadn’t touched in years, and Craft, which I use regularly in my work at ProPublica. The former felt bloated and the latter’s setup presumed a level of back-end know-how… See more →

Every October, I make a schedule of dozens of horror films, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. I call it Robtober, only half-ashamedly. It’s fun! For the past few years, I’ve announced the schedule’s contents via blog posts with increasingly elaborate designs, effectively dressing my site up for Halloween. This year, I wanted to harness some of my favorite visual themes from horror movie marketing (such as posters and trailers), and distorted hand-lettering… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. It’s usually a mix of home viewings and public theatrical screenings, and the schedule is published both for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me. This year, sadly, the pandemic will keep me out of theaters, and guests won’t be able to join me for home viewings. But… See more →

The year is 2020. Summer is giving way to autumn. COVID-19 will have killed a million people by the year’s end, a fifth of them Americans. Unemployment is soaring. Millions have taken to the streets to protest police brutality and its disproportionate effect on Black people. The west coast is engulfed in the fiercest wildfires it’s ever seen. The sky is orange.

In the face of all this, the President of the United States denies… See more →

I might have expected quarantine life to be a boon to my site’s redesign process since most of my preferred social distractions were nullified. Instead, I’ve been using the time in isolation to make music videos, finalize a home purchase, move into said home, and try to find my place in our national reckoning on racism and public safety reform. But as I slowly shift some of my attention back to the redesign, I’ve been… See more →

Since we’ve all been stuck at home since mid-March, my friend Sequoia has been hosting delightful trivia nights for friends on Zoom. In Philadelphia, pub trivia is known as “quizzo,” so Sequoia’s weekly event is cleverly dubbed Sequizzo (or, if you don’t have time for all those syllables, Squizzo). This week’s theme was rock and roll, and when I was asked to commandeer a round, I decided to focus on fictional bands. My questions are… See more →

Though it’s mostly taken place in scattered, stolen moments, I’ve made a lot of progress on the UX of the timeline section, much of which was still a disconcerting mystery not so long ago.

With the help of the data categories and content inventory I established in the previous post, I’ve settled on a binary timeline concept: each post is either small or large. Small posts consist of up to 100 words and/or up to… See more →

Progress on the redesign has slowed, partly because I’ve been busy with other things, and partly because, frankly, the open questions about the timeline section enumerated in my previous post are an intimidating mess, a perfect example of the early stages of the Design Squiggle.

In a fight or flight situation like this, here are the arguments for flight:

• “Uh, the timeline isn’t even your top priority for the site, remember? What’s more important: working on… See more →

AP style is particular about how dates are formatted in various circumstances. strftime uses %b for month abbreviations, but its format (the first three letters of the month: Jan, Feb, etc) differs from AP style’s preferred abbreviations for some months. This Liquid snippet converts strftime’s month abbreviations to AP style:

{{ object | date: '%b. %e, %Y' | replace: 'Mar.', 'March' | replace: 'Apr.', 'April' | replace: 'May.', 'May' | replace: 'Jun.', 'June' | replace:… See more →

Most of this redesign’s structural challenges pertain to the timeline section, previously described thusly:

• Timeline: The blog on the current version of my site, V6, collects most of what I’ve written for public consumption since 2001 across nearly 40 different sources. I’d like to expand that to include even more sources and content types, collecting virtually everything I’ve shared online in one sprawling, sortable/filterable timeline.

Since the projects section is a higher priority and the new… See more →

I added a tiny bit of CSS to aid readability by keeping line lengths in check on larger viewports:

body {
  margin: 0 auto;
  max-width: 75ch;
  padding: 1rem;
}

When calling the CSS file from the page head, I include a query string based on today’s date, which I’ll update when the CSS is updated. This will let updates get past the browser’s cache.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/main.css?20200108" />

Hopefully this small stylistic addition will keep things tidy enough until I properly begin the visual… See more →

The first thing I did when setting up this new version of my site was to put together some minimum viable HTML templates. Here’s the blog post template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title><!--POST TITLE--> | RobWeychert.com V7</title>
    <meta name="description" content="<!--POST DESCRIPTION-->" />
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RobWeychert.com V7" href="/index.rss"/>
  </head>

  <body>
    <… See more →

My immune system didn’t do me many favors in 2019. I was sick on five or six separate occasions in the first half of the year, including an obnoxious bout of bronchitis that lasted the entire month of February. Luckily that didn’t stop me from having an adventurous and fulfilling year, and for the first time in my four years at ProPublica, I used every single one of my vacation days.

Projects

My first three… See more →

Welcome to RobWeychert.com V7! There are a number of new things I want to try with my site, from structure to aesthetics to code, and so it’s time to begin a fresh redesign. Inspired by my friends Jonnie and Frank, I’ve decided to do it in public from the ground up. I’m starting with bare-bones HTML and as the design process unfolds, each step will be reflected on the site in real time and documented… See more →

Sometime during the development of Tinnitus Tracker, it occurred to me that color would be a good way to give its many entries—which span nearly three decades—a sense of time and place. Colors would change with the seasons and fade over time. In effect, every single day of the past 30 years would have a unique color scheme, each day looking slightly different than the day before. As a bonus, the color’s constant flux as… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films, most of which I haven’t seen before. Films and dates (all subject to change) are listed for any friends who want to join me, and ticket links are included for public screenings.

This year, I’ve set aside a weekend to plow through the entire Nightmare on Elm Street series (I’ve only ever seen the first three). I’m also finally finishing off (the current version… See more →

I expected learning musical notation to be like learning another language, and it is. But unlike learning a phonetic language that uses a familiar alphabet, music’s symbology constitutes its own unique alphabet. And while its symbols can be interpreted vocally, they’re just as likely to be interpreted with an instrument (in my case, a guitar). Rather than an English speaker learning Spanish, the process is more like an English speaker learning Arabic and translating it… See more →

Thanks to Tinnitus Tracker’s many browsing options, there are more than 1,000 lists of shows on the site, making the show list the most prevalent design pattern. It was clear from the start that this would be the case, and the design of event listings is something I’ve given a lot of thought as a designer and music fan, so it was the first thing I explored in early sketches and mockups.

My initial… See more →

Earlier this month I launched Tinnitus Tracker, my last big personal creative project left over from 2018. That frees me up to get down to business on my main creative goal for 2019: making music.

I’m a lifelong music fanatic and always wanted to be able to call myself a musician, but I didn’t get around to really making an effort until about ten years ago, when I started taking guitar lessons. I had to… See more →

In the spring of 2015, Last.fm, a social site that tracks users’ music listening habits, gave subscribers a sneak peek at its upcoming redesign. The first thing I noticed was that the Events section, which I had been using for a decade to catalog the shows I went to, was gone. It was reinstated when the redesign was publicly unveiled a few months later, but the temporary evaporation of my data was a good reminder:… See more →

A lot happened in 2018. The ruinous Trump administration continued doing its ruinous thing. I finally deleted my Facebook account. I had a stressful couple of months caused by something that rhymes with “head hugs,” which I would gladly trade the life of any loved one to avoid going through again. I visited the UK for the first time. I published 33 blog posts, including several well-received posts on design and development.

Projects

Let’s check in… See more →

Having just wrapped up another successful Robtober, I’m already thinking ahead to next year. Making a month-long schedule of horror movies is always more work than I think it will be, especially because I aim for most of the movies to be ones I haven’t seen before. As I’ve covered previously, my curation process is fairly involved, but I recently realized I’ve been ignoring a hugely valuable resource.

It’s Letterboxd, dummy

Anyone who’s paid any… See more →

Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films, most of which I haven’t seen before. Films, dates, and times (all subject to change) are listed for any friends who want to join me, and ticket links are included for public screenings. The schedule is also available as a handy Google calendar and as a Letterboxd list.

This year, Michael Myers’ imminent return to the big screen has inspired me to binge my way… See more →

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.
—Sol LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, 1967

I felt the first rumblings of the obsession a little over a year ago. I’m a big fan of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, and on a pilgrimage to MASS MoCA’s sprawling retrospective exhibition of them, I glimpsed some curious cube structures by LeWitt scattered around the museum. A short while later, in a used bookstore in Philadelphia, I stumbled… See more →

A couple of years ago, I got a very unexpected email:

I wanted to inquire as to whether you were student at Kutztown University under the tutelage of Dr. Tom Schultz, and if you made an animated film in 1998 under the tile "Twelve Bucks".

Apart from the misspelled name of my professor (it’s actually Schantz), this was correct. But why on earth would someone be contacting me about an old, obscure student film?

The… See more →

Hello! My name is Rob Weychert. I’m an editorial experience designer at ProPublica, which means I work on the overall user experience of the ProPublica site as well as working on custom art direction and layout for some of our big feature stories.

ProPublica is my first newsroom, but I’ve been designing websites for a long time, long enough to have had a good number of perspective-rattling epiphanies about what web design can be. The one… See more →