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cURL + Airtable + ./jq = squeaky clean JSON

We’re working on a new site for SB-PH at the moment, and we’re using Airtable to get our project documentation together. It’s also a good opportunity to test the platform a little (+ I’m a fan of tables). To grab tidy JSON for use with data-friendly design software like Sketch, we’re using the Airtable API with cURL and ./jq.

Simple example that dumps table records in to a JSON file for use with the the Sketch Data Populator plugin:

$ curl https://api.airtable.com/v0/YOUR_BASE_KEY/YOUR_TABLE_NAME -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" | jq '.records' > records.json

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Research involving NAS, backups, storage, etc.

Aside: Thumbs up to Katie Floyd’s Policies info. Super clear.

Edit: See well-timed Guardian article “Ask Jack: Should I buy a NAS drive to back up my laptop?”

Edit 15 March 2019: Katie Floyd seems to have taken her site offline, and her post about NAS usage isn’t archived in the Wayback Machine. 🙁

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Chinese web font research

Did some research on Chinese web font best practices a while back when working on Memory Machine for Tyler Coburn + Asia Art Archive with Luke Gould. It was an interesting challenge. This was my overall takeaway from the research:

  • Self-hosted fonts are out, the font files are prohibitively enormous due to the number of characters
  • The Great Firewall can cause issues with most font services, so no Google Fonts or Typekit
  • If you need to render a mixture of Latin and Chinese characters and want them to use different fonts, the font stack structure and naming is critical (see article by Kendra Schaefer for more info)
  • Bold and italic should never be used for emphasis on Chinese characters since it distorts their meaning

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Shopify theme dev notes, early 2018

We’re picking up a Shopify site that was put on hold for a little bit, and I’m pleasantly surprised by a few things I’ve come across. The pause might have been blessing in disguise for the site on the whole. The dev tools have progressed a bit during the hiatus, and I’ve come across a Sections workaround that might 🤞 give a little more content flexibility beyond the homepage.

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On archiving/preserving websites

SB and I have been chatting about the whys, whens and hows involved in archiving a website. Archiving is always an uphill battle. It’s hard to take care of things as they age no matter what the material, and ageing code comes with a specific set of worries.

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WordPress security resources

Links to a few of the security resources I find useful, some WordPress-specific and some more general.

A note about that “step-by-step” guide: it’s pretty decent, but IMO Wordfence is a better security plugin to go with. Sucuri is maybe more user-friendly, but Wordfence comes with more out-of-the-box (incl. two factor authentication and login limiting) and the settings seem more granular. Doesn’t hurt to try both though to see what’s the best fit.

Last edited 22 June 2019

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Simon Lamb on his practice

I believe that a worthwhile clinic must have a purpose to compliment its existence; not only the everyday purpose it was designed for, but beyond that, a practice must improve the quality of the field it belongs to and the athletic community it works for.

A little while back, Sam showed me a video on BBC sport with runner Simon Lamb about how running has helped him manage his mental health problems. He then showed me Simon’s blog, Six Seconds High. Though I’m not a runner (and unfortunately probably never will be due to knee stuff), I really liked reading his thoughts about running, sport, mental health and how he runs his sport therapy clinic.