Bob Monsour

I spent a few hours mulling over this website and futzing with it. I tweaked some CSS to simplify things. And I decided to add more tags to some of my posts. The personal category was a bunch of odd stuff. Those posts also have tags like travel, politics, and health. I'm having second thoughts about calling this section of the site a microBlog...

Table of ContentsIntroductionImages & captionsTables of contentsConclusion Introduction It has taken me a while, but I'm becoming more comfortable with markdown, and specifically plugins for the markdown-it markdown parser. Up until now, I had been doing a few things in a rather brute force way and it was taking more effort than I thought it...

Table of ContentsIntroductionInjections and exercise have bought me timeI can only delay this for so longA robot has entered the chatMy right knee implant was cementedI won't miss the tourniquet on my thighHow am I preparing?Conclusion Introduction November 5th of this year was the 4th anniversary of having a total knee replacement for my right...

Wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving. Be safe, be grateful and enjoy the day.

I have been using Pagefind on this site for some time to handle site search. I was finding that some searches turned up pages and posts that had more results than made sense, i.e., the results were overly broad. For example, prior to the tweak that I'm about to describe, a search for the word "doing" would return any word with "do" as its stem....

I just heard Robb Knight and John Voorhees of MacStories, talk more about Robb's EchoFeed service. It takes your RSS feed and "echoes" the latest entry to one or more social media or other services. In their Ruminate podcast, it was noted that once you add that "one more" social media account, it becomes a bit more of a pain to post on them...

Ever since the Eleventy v3.0.0 came out and the new Eleventy Image plugin came out with the its new Transform capability, I had been wanting to give it a try. We'll I did that today and coverted my entire site into using it. The results are pretty astonishing. Here are the basics steps I took to do it: Removed the image shortcode Updated all of...

Update #2: It seems that I once again missed a key result when one eliminates the date field in a post's front matter. It turns out (again, as explicitly mentioned in the Eleventy docs) that CI environments don't really know what the created date is as the file system creation date, i.e., on my laptop bears no resemblence to the file system at...

There's a very cool service called Skircle that generates an image of your circle of friends on Bluesky. I'm happy to be encircled by this crowd, whether it's me following them or them following me (not sure). I think it's the former, or perhaps a combination.

Well, we've returned from our 2-week trip to Italy. It was a great trip, but now I have to sort out what activities am I going to choose to engage in. Sure, I have a handful of things that fit into my week-to-week routines. Those include things like working out, maintaining the 11ty Bundle website, reading the book for our upcoming bookclub...

We're still in Italy, but Issue 61 of the 11ty Bundle is shaping up to be a doozy. We fly back home to the US in a couple of days. I'll be dropping Issue 61 next Tuesday. Lot's to digest before summarizing it all. Stay tuned!

We left the US on election day, heading to Rome. We spent a few days in Rome, seeing various museums and other historic sites. We spent a very long four and a half hours in the Vatican Museum, which was a bit much, but also pretty incredible. At the end of that day, I suffered a lengthy episode of atrial fibrillation. It took 4 doses of...

We flew from San Francisco to Rome yesterday. When we landed in Zurich on the first leg of the trip, I immediately switched to the eSim I'd purchased, got access to the local cell network, and opened the Washington Post app on my phone, only to be greeted with the distressing news of Trump's victory. I was stunned. I couldn't believe it. I was in...

Well, yesterday day ended well and I feel a helluva lot better. Here's why: I got Dropbox working on my laptop, so it's coming with me to Italy. I solved an Eleventy problem that was causing me serious grief. I decided that I wanted to have the main feed of site's blog include these microblog posts as well as having a separate feed. While in the...

Just a dump of things I'm anxious about right now: The election tomorrow. That's all I need to say about that...except that I sure hope Kamala wins. We're flying to Italy tomorrow. It should be a fun trip, but I'm always worried about this kind of trip. It's everything from making sure I've packed everything to the flight being on time. If I had...

I'd been wanting to redesign my personal website for a while. I've had sketches and ideas, but no will to get started. Then, finally, a couple of days ago, I sat down and started futzing. What you're seeing now is a modified site design and not exactly something I'd call a complete redesign. It's more of a simplification with some new...

Now that I've redesigned the home page of this site, I've decided that I want to write more, but in shorter pieces. Hence, this microBlog. I'll still write some longer pieces on the main blog, but this will help me to write more spontaneously and more often. It will be what it will be.

Update (July 22, 2024): I want to express my deep gratitude to President Biden for putting our country over his own personal considerations. His decision to not seek re-election is a testament to his character and his commitment to the country. I am grateful for his service and wish him the best. And I heartily endorse Vice President Harris for...

Table of ContentsIntroductionLet's start by upgrading to 11ty v3Now let's reorganize the eleventy configurationThings are now quite brokenIt was time to start ESM'ingThere was one more thing TL;DR: I proceeded to do 3 things...re-organize my eleventy configuration, upgrade to v3, and convert everything to ESM...all at the same time. And it turned...

Table of ContentsIntroductionWhere to start?Find the link to the RSS feedWhere's your feed? Please add it to your siteMore visitors follow more authors, and that's a win!What else could be done? TL;DR: As part of updating the elements of each 11ty Bundle post, I had to find the RSS feed for the author's website. This is how I did it...and some...

Table of ContentsIntroductionIt's just JSON, how hard could it be?It's good to seek advice from othersWhere to start? The file systemSo what should this script do?Inquirer, but not CommanderOne needs clean data to start withUpdating the 11ty Bundle sourceOh, so you want to edit what you've entered?But wait, it gets betterA couple of other scripts...

It's been nearly 9 years since I lost the hearing on my left side. To be precise, the hearing on my left side has been replaced by a constant tone of about 3.2kHz. Thankfully, I am able to ignore it most of the time. It was a Friday night. I had been taking clarinet lessons from an awesome teacher. Sadly, I am unable to remember his name. Anyway,...

The 11ty Bundle website launched one year ago today. I'm still doing it. I'm still writing posts (check out Issue 41, the latest), still adding features, still tweaking the design. I'm still enjoying it. It's funny looking back at the first few posts where I kept saying what the next issue would focus on (at the time, Migrating to Eleventy), but...

Inspired by the mention of time-lapse films by Sara Joy in Manuel Moreale's interview with her (part of his People & Blogs series), I thought I'd share a story about a time-lapse project that I was involved with back in 2005-06. The setting was a private school in Princeton, New Jersey that my son was attending. I had managed to get overly...

Table of ContentsIntroductionDisplaying the postsBut they're all a little differentAn interim step before short-codingShortcode to the rescueOutstanding issuesConclusion Introduction I've been tinkering with the 11tybundle site here and there, doing things like: adding Robb Knight's post graph plugin adding pagefind search to the whole site...

As the https://11tybundle.dev/ site has grown, so has the build time. It was taking about 30 seconds to build the site. It was getting a bit frustrating to wait for a new build each time I wanted to test a small change. I wanted to see if I could reduce that time. You see, every post has an entry in multiple places on the site. First, it is...

We've been spending the last few days in Carmel CA, a truly beautiful place. The beach is our favorite place. Our dog, Soda, can run off leash and play around with all the other dogs and we can get a nice refreshing walk into our day. Yesterday, the sunset was amazing. I took a few photos and wanted to share them.

I've been trying to spend less time on social media, primarily Mastodon. There were too many things that I wanted to learn, but I too often found myself scrolling into oblivion. I wanted to deep my web development knowledge in certain areas; specifically, I wanted to learn more about and become more proficient with CSS. To that end, I decided to...

[UPDATE Oct 1, 2024]: I have since removed webmentions from this site. It's a long story. That said, here is how I had done it back then. Table of ContentsIntroductionWhat are webmentions?How do I connect my website to the webmention plumbing?Getting the mentions from webmention.ioSlicing and dicing the mentionsDisplaying them with the...

I'm seeing so many create their own list of default apps with Rob Knight's encouragement. Robb is the one who started this thing. For your consideratio, I hereby offer my defaults (in no particular order). calendar: Google Calendar in Chrome (tab 1) mail: Google Mail in Chrome (tab 2) browser: you guessed it, Chrome password manager: 1password...

Table of ContentsIntroductionPagefind from CloudCannonGetting it working in developmentIntegrating with the production buildRefining what gets indexedStyling the search boxConclusion Introduction The more blog posts that I write, I've begun to wonder about how best to organize the growing archive. Should the archive show a paginated list of...

Table of ContentsIntroductionWhere does the data come from?The Firehose template Introduction I just added a feature to the Firehose page of the 11tybundle.dev site. You can now collapse the list of posts by year. I thought I'd share how the page is built. The collapsing feature has been on my list of things to do, but I was feeling a bit...

Table of ContentsIntroductionPagination in a javascript template Introduction In Issue 20 of the 11ty Bundle blog, I wrote about Zach asking me to generate an API for the new CMS page in the Eleventy docs. What he wanted was a json file that included the basic post information for all the posts in that category. While I was delighted to receive...

Table of ContentsIntroductionFirst, a rathole only a mother could loveYes, I relied on ChatGPT againI've got the code, but I need to authenticatePicking away at build errorsBut something else brokeIt was time for an "Oh shit!" momentThe new, and even better, workflowConclusionThe Code for the Google Sheets API access Introduction In my last post,...

Table of Contents Table of ContentsTable of ContentsIntroductionGoogle Searching for Google ThingsDid it Work? Kinda...Enter ChatGPT (or Bard)A Workflow TweakA Couple of Other Wins with this ApproachConclusionThe Code [UPDATE: 10-30-2023]: I've abandoned this technique as it was, as they say, a fools errand. I have converted from this method to...

Table of ContentsIntroductionEnter the KettlebellAll the Basic Kettlebell ExercisesMy Current RegimenThis is All Useless without Good Nutrition Introduction As a 68-year-old man who has lived more years than his father and brother, I have come to believe that maintaining some sort of exercise regimen is one very important aspect of living a...

UPDATE 2023-06-22: I wrote about how I addressed the question posed here in Issue 9 of the 11ty Bundle. You may (or may not) know that I am the developer of the site 11tybundle.dev. The primary content on the site is a curated list of links to blog posts about the static site generator Eleventy. The posts are organized by category and by author....

UPDATE MAY 15, 2023: THE 11ty BUNDLES 1 THROUGH 4 HAVE BEEN MOVED TO 11tybundle.dev. Now that the 11ty Bundle has taken on a life of its own, it has been fleshed out over at 11tybundle.dev. The first four issues have been moved there, and subsequent issues will be published there as well. On the site, you also find a broad collection of Eleventy...

Hopefully, you've read part 1. If not, I'll wait here... also, this post as well as part 1 can be found on the 11ty Bundle site, a community site for sharing Eleventy tips, tricks, and resources. If you're an Eleventy user, I encourage you to check it out. Table of ContentsIntroductionTo inline or not to inlineEnter the...

While initially a single post about my evolving use of CSS, there is now a second part which you can find here. But you should really read this one first. Also, this post as well as part 2 can be found on the 11ty Bundle site, a community site for sharing Eleventy tips, tricks, and resources. If you're an Eleventy user, I encourage you to check...

Table of ContentsIntroductionPractice statsRe-learning to focusThe early bumps of learningMemorizing Happy BirthdayLearning and practicing scalesFollowing the course songs vs. what I want to playHow do I sound? Not great.What's next? Introduction So, here I sit on the 30th day of my journey to learn to play the piano. This is yet another way to...

Table of ContentsIntroductionWhy now?How should I start this journey?Feeling overwhelmedHolding myself accountableSo, how's it going? Introduction Well, a new year has started and while I rarely write new year's resolutions, the combination of the new year and some other audio and mental murmurings got me interested in learning to play the piano....

NOTE: This piece was originally posted on Medium, on August 31st, 2020. I underwent total knee replacement surgery on November 5, 2020, smack in the middle of the pandemic. The good news is that the replacement went very well and now, 3 years later, I'm very glad I did it. Table of ContentsIntroductionIs there a doctor in the house?Is this the...

I left the dumpster fire that is Twitter a couple of weeks ago. There were multiple proverbial last straws that caused me to deactivate my Twitter account. It started with Musk tweeting the first of what seemed like several conspiracy theories, including one about the attack on Paul Pelosi. It ended with the suspension of several prominent...

NOTE: I originally posted this on Medium, on August 1st, 2020, one year following Bill's death. I am re-posting it here now that I've built this blog. I've been thinking about him a lot lately...and missing him terribly. It was one year ago today that I lost my brother Bill to pancreatic cancer, a most horrid disease. He was 66 years old, 2 years...

NOTE: I originally posted this on Medium, on January 4th, 2022. The version below has some very minor edits. The following recounts a very real dream/nightmare that I had in the early morning hours of Jan 4, 2022. There's a game I play with myself whenever I get up to pee at night, I guess what time it is, I look at my phone and I see how close I...

Note: I am no longer using Open Props as I've decided to reduce the number of levels of abstraction that I use to maintain the CSS for this site. I still find it a fascinating tool, but for the size and scope of this project, I am finding it easier to maintain my own set of custom properties for the few things I need them for. [UPDATE: July 19,...

Note: I am no longer using Open Props as I've decided to reduce the number of levels of abstraction that I use to maintain the CSS for this site. I still find it a fascinating tool, but for the size and scope of this project, I am finding it easier to maintain my own set of custom properties for the few things I need them for. Open Props? What's...

Where does that '3 minutes to read' come from? Each of the posts on this site (there are only two so far, and this is the second one), display something like "About 1 minute to read." This indicates that it will take about one minute to read the post. I had seen that on other sites, inlcuding Medium, and I always thought it was kinda neat. I was...

Welcome to the first post of my new site! I've built the site with something called 11ty, also known as eleventy. It's a static site generator that I'm still learning how to use. I'll be writing about my experience in building this site as well as a few others I've built using eleventy. Some of the posts will be eleventy focused, while others...