New Practice: Seasonal Cleaning

At the end of August I started a new quarterly practice: Seasonal Cleaning! 🧼✨

For ~one week in a season, my intent is to spend any personal project time on fixing issues in previously-shipped side projects, as opposed to building new things. I was hoping to chip away at issues across the week, but due to work/life stuff, most of my fixes were concentrated on the weekend. Still, got a few things done!

Something interesting I learned in the course of this is that on Github, you can create a “project” with issues from various different (manually-connected) repos that a person/organization owns. So my Seasonal Cleaning kanban board includes issues from across my own public and private Github repos.

Here’s what I fixed this time around:

Bucket List

Renamed the master branch to main.

Good Things

Moved references to my name/URLs to site data, to make it easier for folks to update that info in their forks.

Highlights

• Renamed the master branch to main.
• Thinking about converting this and the bucket list site from Jekyll to Eleventy. I admit it: utter fangirl for Eleventy. Also really don’t enjoy taking a local dependency on Ruby just to compile a static site.

Personal Site

• Pruned blog post ideas
• Webmentions (here’s an example post):
  • Labeled with an icon any Webmentions that are coming from Twitter
  • Made it easier to tell what are “response” tweets by labeling these “Reply from…”
  • Fixed a bug where Webmentions weren’t displaying quite in chronological order. Realized that the property values I was comparing in my sort function were strings, not Dates. D’oh. 🤦‍♀️ Fun with data types!
  • Added a cron job to build and deploy the site daily, in order to regularly fetch any new Webmentions
• A couple weeks ago, I had made it so that for any posts published elsewhere, their tiles on blog indices would take you immediately to the publication in question. I, uh, forgot that post pagination wouldn’t skip over these posts though, and so the single page view for these posts was basically useless. Added a treatment for these kinds of posts, as opposed to removing them from the pagination loop.
• Cleaned up meta tags
• Fixed a minor margin bug

Process / Dev Environ

I’d like to have a consistent set of issue tags across my repos: same syntax, label colors, etc from project to project. I’m trying to figure out the best way to go about this. It’s a pain to create a new repo, delete or modify the default generated labels, then add my own.

This week I tried creating a template repo, and included a few of the issue labels I wanted on this template. When I started a new test repo from the template, however, none of the issue labels carried over. 😕 I’ll have to see if there’s a good way to generate these using Github Actions instead.

That’s it for this Seasonal Cleaning! Anyone do something similar?