We took a little day trip up to Storm King with some friends this past weekend on the most terrifyingly summery day of Autumn. B seemed to love it. Of what we saw, I think that Calder’s The Arch and Noguchi’s Momo Taro were his favorites. I think he was just bowled over by the… | Continue reading
I gave up too soon! Emerson from Flywheel did more digging in the Fastly cache documentation and realized that we could tweak the NGINX config to fully support content negotiation. He added a Vary header to the necessary URLs et voilà, everything started working properly. Now, co … | Continue reading
I recently moved my hosting from NFSN to Flywheel. NFSN had served me beautifully for years, very economically, but I just don’t have as much time for admin anymore and Flywheel’s managed WordPress hosting was a useful move to cut down on that stress. Alongside the hosting move, … | Continue reading
It’s been an awful, heartbreaking October. I don’t really know what to say about the conflict in Gaza and Israel. Part of it is that I don’t feel like I know enough. Both about all of the micro and macro events that have led up to this, and what’s going on in this moment. And… | Continue reading
Finally went ahead and joined Bluesky, @piperhaywood.bsky.social (missed out on @piper, ah well). Thx for the code, Sam. 😘 Definitely not planning to leave Mastodon any time soon, but it felt like it was time to give it a go. IDK, Mastodon has started to feel… very pessim … | Continue reading
I’ve been working on a little side project recently that has been in the backlog for ages. I finally have a moment to pull it together, and it’s helping me brush up on a few Next.js 13 features I haven’t had the chance to play with yet. As part of that, I’m doing a lot… | Continue reading
See Dave Rupert’s post on scroll shadows with animation-timeline. Browser support isn’t quite there yet so it’s more of a progressive enhancement, but this is a great use case example. He wrote that off the back of Bramus’s scroll-driven animation exploration, and wow. So many of … | Continue reading
Currently listening to Transatlanticism 🐦 by Death Cab for Cutie. One of my best friends from college just invited me to the Death Cab + Postal Service 20th anniversary gig at Madison Square Garden on the 20th. I am SO pumped. Listening to Transatlanticism is giving me ma … | Continue reading
Turns out B is a biiiiiiig fan of Jonathan Richman. Wheels on the Bus, Afternoon, Ice Cream Man, Tandem Jump. Gonna try some more this weekend. | Continue reading
ooh.directory is “a collection of 2,018 blogs about every topic”. Pretty cool, and useful at a time when the major search engines seem to be totally whacked. And, my site is on it! Found out about it from Sam. ❤️ This led me in turn to its creator Phil Gyford’s personal site. Lov … | Continue reading
All of the birthdays in our little family fall within a 15 day period in the middle of the summer. There was a lot of cake around for nearly a month. And then we went to the UK to visit family who kindly wanted to celebrate all of our birthdays, so we did it all… | Continue reading
Counterpoint to yesterday’s post: “Kill your personas: How persona spectrums champion real user needs” by Margaret Price at Microsoft. A persona spectrum is not a fake person. It’s an articulation of a specific human motivation and the ways it’s shared across multiple groups. It … | Continue reading
If you’re a designer or engineer and have never dug in to accessibility personas or cognitive walkthroughs before, I’d recommend checking out GDS’s accessibility persona homepages and their accompanying blog post about how they use persona profiles to test accessibility. As of ri … | Continue reading
It’s been a wild few months professionally. Earlier this year, I was asked to be the Engineering Manager at SuperHi and started in that role in May. That same month, I gave a talk at Parsons on the invitation of Eric Li and Michael Fehrenbach for their Typography and Interaction … | Continue reading
This is my Grandma Piper’s classic white frosting recipe that she always used on the family recipe for white layer cake. Her notes: “This frosting is super. It never hardens on the cake. BUT, it is only enough for sides and top. So must use a filling.” I just doubled it for B’s b … | Continue reading
It’s such a stereotype. But there really is a moment when suddenly they’re not a baby anymore. You open up your phone to look for particular photo and notice it’s automatically made a memories album of your kid. So you click and watch, and realize you missed the moment, whenever … | Continue reading
Context This recipe was in the cookbook that my Grandma Piper customized for me. This is apparently the cake that the Piper family always made for weddings (so my great-grandma’s recipe on my Grandpa’s side, I think), and my Grandma made it for birthday parties. I made this for t … | Continue reading
This post by Peter Richardson is wild. I considered doing something like this a few years ago but A) the tech didn’t exist / wasn’t easily accessible, and B) I’ve been sort of afraid of how deep the rabbit hole is. | Continue reading
My favorite season as a kid was summer (obvi). Then autumn in my 20s, maybe because I actually started experiencing it then. Now it’s spring. You get all of the excitement and anticipation of summer without the humidity and mosquitos. Not sure it will ever be winter, but who know … | Continue reading
I think it’s time to get in to macrame. The big girl version of my childhood friendship bracelet habit. F**k It, bring back friendship bracelets too! | Continue reading
My grandma’s cheesecake is truly the best around in my opinion, and it has been a huge hit on the extremely rare occasions I have made it for friends. It is a little involved to make, you really need to follow the instructions and ingredients quite carefully in order for this to … | Continue reading
This is a re-written version of my grandma’s recipe. I inhaled this as a kid. It’s basically a really massive “drop” biscuit that you then slice in to portions and drown in strawberries + milk. It is one of the quickest and easiest things to make, a must between May and June. You … | Continue reading
I think you could do a ton of great variations on this recipe. Like a crushed gingersnap base with chocolate ice cream and butterscotch chips instead of chocolate chips. Or a Biscoff cookie base with coffee ice cream. Or a graham cracker base with quality, real vanilla ice cream. … | Continue reading
This site is ‘bout to become a recipe blog for a hot second… The SuperHi crew was talking about favorite cakes recently, and I have a lot of family recipes to share. | Continue reading
So apparently you can’t set your iPhone to show AM and PM alongside the 12-hour time. This may not seem like a big deal, but I think it’s a pretty significant accessibility issue. My grandpa is 100 years old, we just celebrated his birthday in March. He’s doing pretty darn well f … | Continue reading
Ingredients 1¼ c (112 g) rolled oats 1¼ c (250 g) unsweetened apple sauce ¼ c (50 g) sugar ½ c (118 mL) milk (oat milk works too) 4 T coconut oil (melted butter works too) 1 t vanilla extract 1 large egg 1 c (130 g) whole wheat flour 1 t baking powder ¾… | Continue reading
We made it up to the northernmost stanza stone with B. He wasn’t thrilled about the whole walk, but he did love squishing his boots in the mud and chowing down on a vegan Greggs sausage roll. During lunch one day, we heard an insane screeching in front of my sister-in-law’s house … | Continue reading
People think that serial / “Oxford” commas should be an optional style thing. But if you’re writing for the web, please use it. Here’s an example of a sentence without a serial comma: Please bring Jack, your brother and your uncle to the party And an example of a sentence with a … | Continue reading
Updated my Now page, contents below for posterity. View past presents. Since the last update in April 2022: In broader, non-personal news, for posterity’s sake: 🌻 the terrible war in Ukraine continues, 💔 Roe v. Wade was repealed, 🐦 Twitter was bought by a … | Continue reading
\ | | | \ / _ . \ „;=`y . | .⁻⁻> \« ` | `: /”» ’ / . ,/ `\;`. `=„\`/; „=’ ”.=’ | ’ , =\;` /, =”;„ ==./--=.”» / ’ \`v 8/,”-./ `` ,-`/--’ \\\|// ` v__,=” \ \\y¡’ _,/, | Continue reading
The entire tree was covered in rows of these woodpecker holes, head to foot. I’m pretty sure it’s a crabapple. Supposedly sapsuckers drill these holes and come back for a sweet drink every once in a while. These holes are probably old, there shouldn’t be any sap flowing yet this … | Continue reading
EL and KT came over for dinner last weekend and brought cake. WHAT A CAKE. It was a chocolate coffee crunch cake. I asked EL, basically it’s this chocolate cake with coffee whipped cream and honeycomb as per this Serious Eats recipe. It was insanely good. Super decadent, but also … | Continue reading
Even though I’ve said to you that she hardly ever wrote a full-page poem, I know of one that I think relates to writing. And I’d like to read that if I could. I happen to have a copy of it. As far as I know it’s never been published, but I’ve kept Ursula’s poems… | Continue reading
Quick tip: If you hang your toilet paper the “wrong” way around so that the newest sheet hangs down the back rather than the front, it’s a lot harder for a kid or pet to idly spin the roll and unravel the whole thing. Guests will think you’re unhinged, but it’s a small price to… | Continue reading
I read somewhere that poor balance is heavily tied to memory loss later in life. Wish I could remember where… Now I stand on one foot while brushing my teeth. The right foot and right side of my mouth for the first minute timed by my electric toothbrush, and the left foot / side … | Continue reading
BTG “got looped in on a project that’s trying to understand how microgravity impacts bone healing by comparing earth and space station mice”. (My friends are much cooler than me.) She said that most of the mice that go to space are female since the male mice usually kill each oth … | Continue reading
We all caught norovirus. About 24 hrs of it was probably the worst time we’ve had since B was born, and the rest of the time wasn’t much better. I won’t go in to the gory details, but here’s a few tips for future me who will inevitably catch it again (because daycare). Apparently … | Continue reading
Reading recs from Gem: 📕 The “living autobiography” series by Deborah Levy 📖 Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel 📖 Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson (though she did say I might find this tough, I have a hair-trigger emotional core since B was born) … | Continue reading
Yesterday was… eventful. Anyways, I now have a decent technique for thoroughly cleaning Jellycat stuffed animals! Note that the Jellycat cleaning tag specifically says to spot clean only. But that doesn’t cut it if, for example, one happens to get covered in vomit. I’d probably u … | Continue reading
Two small changes on this site. Just added RSS links to many of my categories. They’ve always existed, I just figured it would be nice to include them in the category description. See my RSS page for more info about RSS in general and category-specific RSS. And I added an “attrib … | Continue reading
Check out WAI’s alt Decision Tree. Really useful for considering how alt text should work against any image. And more broadly, their tutorials seem great, super practical and succinct. Don’t know how I’d missed them before. The whole WAI website is an unbelievable resource, we’re … | Continue reading
So CommandR hasn’t been reloading my VSCode window. But the “Reload window” command in the palette (ShiftCommandP to open palette) shows that it should work. Charles told me how to fix it! To sort it out, click the cog icon next to the “Reload window” command in the palette to op … | Continue reading
I am LOVING my new Kobo Clara 2E. Just wild that all of Brooklyn Public Library’s e-books are at my fingertips at the click of a button. I just need to figure out how to get my old Walthamstow Library card set up too… B seems to have become a whole new little person over… | Continue reading