Projects

Nobody writes them like they used to, so it may as well be me. #quarantunes

Only time will tell. #quarantunes (feat. @hoyboy_ )

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 →

#quarantunes gear

#quarantunes

Until now, I always got by on my own. #quarantunes

Fun fact I recently learned: @heartofficial didn’t write this song and they weren’t the first to record it (though their version is the best).

When the night falls, my lonely heart calls. #quarantunes

Had some help from my buddy @username_final.final_final on this one, as well as some last-minute EQ magic from @larrylegend. 🙌🏻

They just wanna. #quarantunes

Some girls like to buy new shoes and others like driving trucks and wearing tattoos. There’s only one thing they all like a bunch. Girls, they wanna have lunch. Girls just wanna have lunch. #quarantunes

My site redesign is starting to look like a thing! v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/03/v…

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 →

Resuming redesign activities by taking inventory on content and wondering if I’m overdoing it. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/02/v…

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 →

Indulging in a pricey collector’s item is a rare occasion for me, but this LeWitt work is an obsession of mine. cubes-revisited.art

Just cooked up a little gist to make Liquid strftime month abbreviations play nice with AP style. gist.github.com/robweychert/7d…

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 →

It’s that time of year again. features.propublica.org/cabinet-cards/…

Enumerating some of the structural challenges of the timeline section I have in mind for my site redesign: v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/01/v…

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 →

A brief overview of my content priorities for my site redesign. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/01/v…

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 →

Apparently <meta name="viewport"> is still necessary. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/01/v…

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 →

Kicking off 2020 by redesigning my site in public from the ground up and blogging every step of the process. v7.robweychert.com/blog/2020/01/v…

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 →

@teleject @24accessibility You can see some of these concepts in action in my recent post on dynamic color. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

I put the Sass typographic scale generator from my @24ways article into a handy gist: gist.github.com/robweychert/46…

I’ve been reading @24ways every December since 2005. Always wanted to contribute. This year, I did! 24ways.org/2019/a-modern-…

I’ve been studying music theory this year. While some of its core concepts were already familiar to me, much of their specifics were not. Or so I thought. A funny thing happened when I was learning the major scales. While playing through a song I had written some years before, I started picking it apart to see how it correlated with the theory I was learning. I had composed the melody without any thought to… See more →

Keeping this in mind for the next time I do something with color changing/fading over time: youtube.com/watch?v=hH_yvD…

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 →

Sometimes I really miss making stupid movies over sleepless weekends with my friends. /cc @iancorey @jasonsantamaria @joel_haddock @mSutters @skycommando

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 →

current status

Added a U.S. map to Tinnitus Tracker. As well as being an overview, it’s something I aim to fill in more. tinnitus.robweychert.com/state/

This is a progressive enhancement I wrote from scratch with vanilla JS. Easy for JS wizards, but I’m not a JS wizard, so I’m proud of it! twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Tinnitus Tracker now has audio embeds on show pages. Here’s an upcoming one I’m especially excited about: tinnitus.robweychert.com/2019/06/22/tor…

I sadly had to remove the texture on iOS due to a background-blend-mode bug. Please let me know if you spot issues in other browsers. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Made improvements to Tinnitus Tracker’s dynamic color schemes (blog post coming soon) and added much-needed texture. tinnitus.robweychert.com

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 →

Broke my glasses just before having headshots taken. Did the shoot without glasses, drew them on later with SVG, and randomized the colors.

Just this week I wrote about how @thetrocadero’s old handbills inspired the design of my new site. v6.robweychert.com/blog/2019/03/c…

Thank you for reading! Pedantic but important distinction: the table markup is semantic and incidental to the layout. twitter.com/simoncoudevill…

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 →

This also marks my first use of @media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce), which results in a static image of the animation’s final frame. twitter.com/robweychert/st…

Had some fun animating gambling addiction, supporting the great reporting of @jasongrotto @sandhya__k @dmihalopoulos features.propublica.org/the-bad-bet/vi…

Pretty excited about the first post-launch update to Tinnitus Tracker: tinnitus.robweychert.com/2019/05/28/bjo…

I did it. I made the most Rob Weychert thing. tinnitus.robweychert.com