Going back to having the main blog appear at the top 7minutemiles.com URL (instead of at 7minutemiles.com/blog). Thinking that the /blog address will automatically redirect, so you may or may not need to update any stored bookmarks for the site…

UPDATE: the initial redirect didn’t work, but it should be now. Please let me know if you have any issues – thanks!

When I look back on web browsers I’ve used on macOS over the years, it seems like I find one I like and just stick with it for a long time. When The Browser Company announced that their new Arc browser was out of closed beta this week, I thought I’d download a copy and take a look. David Pierce at The Verge has been raving about it since last year, but I’m stuck in my ways and a lot of the concepts Arc introduces would take some time to really figure out. I ended up spending about 30 confused minutes with it before deciding to look at everything else out there right now too.

I vaguely remember the days of Netscape, then Firefox, then Safari, then Chrome. Internet Explorer was the evil actor in this story, both on Windows and macOS. As someone who has published websites for fun and for work, web standards were always the goal versus anything proprietary and tied to one browser. As market share has shifted, this goal always seemed elusive, as people would build sites optimized for whatever was the most popular. Thankfully for Mac users, most Windows or IE-only technologies have died out over time and “the web” has become more of a neutral platform. And with the rise of mobile, iOS and Android browsers are probably more influential now on standards than any of the others.

For quite a while now, I’ve used mobile Safari on my iPhone and iPad, but Chrome on my iMac and MacBook Pro. Not really sure why I never went back to Safari on macOS, but Chrome seemed to push out Internet Explorer as the new “standard” for web publishing. I don’t really run into many sites that only work on Chrome (which happened a lot with IE-optimized sites), but I just got comfortable with Chrome – both at work and on my personal devices. It also tied in with my Google ID, which I was using for hosted email and my YouTube account.

So what are the things I look for in a good web browser?

• Display websites correctly
• Password management
• Sync bookmarks across devices
• Privacy and tracker controls
• Ad blocking support
• Customizable toolbars and tabs
• Seamless support for WordPress administration
• Speedy, but power and resource efficient

Looking at the current landscape on macOS, some of these features are implemented via browser extensions. In the Chrome world, I was running the following: 1Password, Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials, Privacy Badger and Google Arts & Culture (a lighthearted extension that just loads a random artwork picture as a background in a new, empty tab). Turns out that there are now Safari versions of the first two, with Privacy Badger promising Safari support soon. I’ve been a (mostly) happy customer of 1Password for a while now, but will be interested to see how system-level password management continues to evolve on Apple platforms (along with passkeys).

Beyond Arc, I downloaded and installed the other new kids (Brave and Vivaldi), along with the current versions of the older kids (Firefox and Microsoft Edge). After following and reading Apple evangelist for Safari and WebKit Jen Simmons on Mastodon, I also wanted to revisit the latest version of Safari (16.6 on Ventura 13.5). I’ll cut right to the chase: Safari 16.6 might be as far as I get in evaluating browsers other than Chrome for the time being. I did end up deleting all traces of Edge from my machine (which was a challenge), but I’ll leave the others installed for more evaluation later.

It had been a fairly long time since I last launched Safari on macOS, so all of my bookmarks were old and there were random extensions installed (including “Open in Ivory” by Tapbots and “Subscribe to Feed” by NetNewsWire). I added 1Password and Duck Duck Go Privacy Essentials, then exported and imported my Chrome bookmarks. Still need to do some cleanup, but overall I like the layout and customization options of the Favorites Bar and how tabs look in the “Separate” tab layout view. Not sure why my version doesn’t have the “Show color in tab bar” toggle in settings, but I’d really like to turn that off (the Compact layout seems to still have it in advanced settings). I tried to find a command line way to change it via a default write, but Google search let me down on that front.

The built-in Safari privacy report button is nice and I’m looking forward to adding back Privacy Badger when that is released. I think that will also help with the layout of ad blocking – I’d prefer that when an ad is blocked, the space is automatically reflowed to make the overall layout more natural (for example, the giant banner ads that the Star Tribune and New York Times like to display at the top of their home pages). Also not a huge fan of the short URLs in the search box, but there is a setting for that and the alternative isn’t much better. It would be nice to have hover tooltips over links too so you quickly see if they are spammy or not. Lastly, sync across devices only partly works for me so far.

So there you have it. I’ll give the built-in Safari a good go for a few weeks and report back. I know Google has had some bad press over their Web Environment Integrity project, but that wasn’t my primary motivator to start reviewing other options to Chrome. It really is something that all of these options exist now, no?

Happy browsing!

Wow – May 27th really snuck up on me. It’s the 20th anniversary of the web publishing platform WordPress and I created a draft of this post nearly two months ago. Thank goodness Jeremy Herve published his WordPress story a few days early so I remembered to come back and finish before the big day.

I won’t rehash all the details of this site, as I tend to do that here every year on March 30th already (the anniversary of my first post). This site is the one I have used WordPress on the most, however, and is the one I focus on more than any other. That said, I have used WordPress on many other sites over the years, including charity golf and sports news sites, personal sites for friends and family and several private intranet sites for companies I have worked for over the years.

While I have never been skilled enough on the coding side to contribute to the project directly, I have leveraged WordPress to learn more about PHP, MySQL, Apache, Nginx and UNIX in general. I ran most of my WordPress sites on Mac OS X in the early days before migrating to a virtual Linux environment on AWS. While I’m still not a fan of the Gutenberg direction, I truly appreciate everyone in the WordPress community – both the paid pros and the volunteer experts.

Happy anniversary, WordPress – stay jazzy forever…

Just a heads up that I will likely be changing the structure of this site in the coming days to help facilitate some business changes with 7 Minute Miles LLC. Haven’t decided 100% for sure yet, but I will probably move all blog posts to a /blog URL (i.e. – 7minutemiles.com/blog). Stay tuned…

Tomorrow marks three months since I joined Mastodon. Just like with Twitter and Tweetbot, I don’t use the web interface of the instance I joined (mastodon.social), but have exclusively used the iOS and macOS Ivory clients, published by Tapbots. I love their work (thanks, Paul and Mark!) – the interface is familiar and polished and my timeline syncs well between devices.

Current stats: 110 posts, 26 followers and following 252.

So what are my thoughts on Mastodon after 90 days? I’ve already written a few posts about Mastodon that you can view here, but I thought I’d write a little today about some big picture things.

In general, I’m now probably spending about as much time reading through posts as I did with Twitter. That’s good *and* bad, as my curated follow list is producing quality content I want to read, but gets to be a lot once I get behind. Engagement so far is lower for me, likely due to having fewer followers here than on Twitter (and I don’t reply to a lot of posts). Also following a bunch of people new to me that I don’t know personally. Not hugely different interaction, though.

The “Mastodon culture” that some critics cite hasn’t really impacted my enjoyment of the platform so far. It definitely exists, but it’s been easy for me to filter out. I don’t really understand the debates about some things (Fediverse vs. Mastodon, intro posts when you have bios), while things like getting more people to add alt descriptions to images is a solid cause. I will never love hashtags, but at least I understand the connection between them and the limited search capabilities of Mastodon (hardly ever used hashtags or search on Twitter).

When everything started to go downhill with Musk and Twitter, there were lots of options that popped up: Post News, Spoutible, Bluesky, Nostr and others. I grabbed an account on Post when I got an invite and I thought I asked to be on the notification list for Bluesky, but I don’t think I will do anything other than Mastodon for now. There seems to be growing advocacy for the platform (and for continued feature improvements). I’d love to play around with my own instance (kingsbury.social?), but the learning curve is quite high compared to other things I’ve done online. Hope to get there eventually, though.

Many times when I get excited about new technologies, I sometimes lose empathy of how that technology is viewed and valued by others. This is probably not uncommon – just look at how much has been written about Twitter (which is significantly smaller than the other major social media platforms). The majority of my family never cared about Twitter and none of them have a Mastodon account. Ask a random person on the street about microblogging or the Fediverse and chances are good those things will be unimportant to them.

That said, I want Mastodon to grow and succeed. I don’t want to see bad actions (and bad actors) be rewarded in the market. An open internet is one of the best inventions humans have ever devised – let’s keep it going, no?

• No furnace
• No water heater
• No refrigerator
• No garage door opener
• No internet
• No television

Come on Xcel – you had it back on for like five minutes…

Just like kottke.org, this site is celebrating an anniversary this week. The first post on 7minutemiles.com was published 17 years ago today. If that wasn’t enough to make me feel super old, I also recently discovered that per ICANN, 7minutemiles.com has a creation timestamp of 2002-11-26T19:08:46Z.

Damn. 20 years.

It looks like I didn’t publish an anniversary post in 2022, so let’s look at what’s happened since the 2021 update:

• Jumped from 12,192 posts to 28,918 (largely due to the new Twitter archive)
• Still have 201 published pages, but cleaned up and dropped a few
• FINALLY moved to a mobile-friendly, responsive theme (intro post, longer post)

I had a draft post sitting around forever about my current AWS virtual server setup, but it’s been so long now that none of the processes to recreate it are probably valid any longer. I’ll just say that I’m very happy with the current environment and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend their Lightsail and Route 53 offerings to anyone who wants to experiment with the Amazon cloud. Currently running one instance in Ohio Zone A with 4 GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 80 GB SSD and Ubuntu 20.04.

WordPress turns twenty later this year and I’m chugging along on the latest 6.2 version (although still with the Classic Editor plugin and no Gutenberg). The new theme helped me get current on PHP (8.2.4) and my backend is running on nginx 1.18.0, with MySQL drop-in replacement MariaDB 10.3.38. The cert process is now fully automated using Let’s Encrypt and so far Just Works™.

Still haven’t really looked at any web server traffic log options for nginx, so let’s take a quick peek at the WordPress.com stats for 2022: 6,843 visitors with 21,664 views and 1,032 likes (which I didn’t even know was a thing). Taking all of those numbers with a large grain of salt, but it is interesting to see that the Spring Hill post got bumped down to the #2 spot (only one view behind the Brian Christopher post).

Thanks for visiting!

With all of the recent press surrounding the second-generation HomePod, it’s easy to forget about the progress made by the baby brother speaker, the HomePod mini. We bought one of each color for the new house and use them daily. I decided on a Sony sound bar for the big TV, but have had issues with the the HT-Z9F that Best Buy and/or Sony has never really resolved completely. If I had to start all over, I’d probably get a pair of the new HomePods and place them on a short table below the TV.

I was shocked to read that the minis had hardware sensors that weren’t initially enabled. With the latest iOS 16.3 software update, however, all of the minis in the house can now respond with both room temperature and humidity level, which is a nice surprise bonus. I haven’t spend much time studying the Home app or any of the enhanced features enabled by HomeKit, but we can ask Siri to open or close the four sets of power blinds in the house. Haven’t really looked at any smart lighting or door lock stuff and our HVAC just has a standard, unconnected Honeywell controller.

Our garage door opener has some online functionality via the LiftMaster myQ app: our add-on camera records movement, can broadcast video and audio remotely to the app and enables Amazon Key delivery. I can’t currently tell Siri to open or close the garage door, but it is kinda cool to enable the speaker when the girls visit and do the old “intruder alert! intruder alert!” The LG washer and dryer we bought are connected to the home network (and have an app), but I really don’t care to get alerts that say a load of laundry is finished.

Siri for me on my phone has a checkered history. In the beginning, it wasn’t very good at understanding my requests, but has definitely improved over time. With the mini speakers, it’s really handy to just tell Siri to do stuff without typing anything. It’s perfect for interacting with Apple Music, setting kitchen timers, getting the weather forecast and closing the blinds earlier than programmed. I’ve also set the Siri voice to be Irish and female, which is all kinds of fun, lassie.

Following up on the soft launch post, I thought I’d share a few more things to document and credit some of the incredible people in the WordPress community that have taught me so much. This post by Nick Schäferhoff was the kick in the pants I needed to just build off my last theme instead of trying to start with someone else’s theme and trying to make it mine. That article really helped me focus on reducing the number of theme files (now just have index.php, single.php and page.php) and finally cleaning up my CSS style sheet.

Mobile-optimized hamburger navigation menus seem to be everywhere, but it took me a while to pick Rui Guerreiro’s WP Mobile Menu plugin. This seemed to be one of the most popular options, with both free and premium versions available. My problem was that it wasn’t the easiest to set up and customize, but all of the people that participate in the support forum (especially Rui) really helped get me across the finish line on that aspect of the project.

Speaking of plugins, I encountered a few issues that needed to be resolved. There were two plugins that I’ve been using for a long time that do not appear to be supported any longer, one breaking with PHP8 (timeago) and the other apparently pulled from the WordPress directory (add-meta-tags). I’ve been using the excellent WordPress security plugin Wordfence for many years and it now alerts me to issues like this, which is very handy. Timeago hadn’t been updated in 13 years and was based on a jQuery plugin of the same name (which was last updated in 2014). Decided to drop the custom dates and just use the standard get_the_date() call for now.

Add-Meta-Tags started development in 2006 and has officially been deprecated and is no longer recommended for production sites. It was easy enough to find another tag plugin – decided to use Meta Tag Manager, by Pixelite (which also has free and paid versions). I thought I previously wrote about the PHP Everywhere plugin issues, but in any case replaced that with Insert PHP Code Snippet by xyzscripts.com a while back. Looks like the Gmail SMTP plugin might be next on the hit list, according to WordFence…

Welcome to the long-delayed new theme for 7 Minute Miles! I’ve had a number of design goals for quite some time, the biggest of which was making this site appear better on mobile devices. A few months ago, I set up a test environment using the excellent WordPress development tool Local, by WP Engine. While there is still a lot of tweaking to do, it’s time to make the switch and make updates to production (I know, I know).

So what were some of my key goals?

• Responsive design
• Dark theme
• Larger fonts/easier to read
• Hamburger menu navigation
• One design for all devices
• Clean up and simplify code
• Full PHP8 support

There were a number of things I initially had on the list that I decided to drop. I still really, really like the three-column newspaper look on larger screens and it was hard to let go of that Masonry codebase that I’ve used for quite a long time. Also decided I just don’t like Gutenberg and don’t want to switch now. That will change if/when the Classic Editor plugin reaches end of life, but I’m comfortable modifying the underlying theme code directly when needed.

So what’s left to do? Lots of testing across different devices (iPhone, iPad, iMac, Windows) and a review of all my previous sub-pages (some of which may not come back). Now that this is live, I need to review the demise of Tweetbot/Twitter and decide how often I want to post here and what format that will take. As always, you can find the RSS feed here and I still highly recommend NetNewsWire for following people.

Thanks for visiting!

This whole thing with Twitter started me down a path with my Twitter archive that has spawned an entire new direction of personal tasks that all tie in with Marie Kondo’s philosophy of reducing clutter and determining what “sparks joy” in your life. I finally figured out a way to automate the creation of posts on this site for every historical @kingsbury tweet that was missing and have set up yearly pages you can access here.

Since Twitter would downsize any attached photos, I’ve been going through those pages to look for pictures that have better originals, then looking through my iCloud library to see if I can locate and update to the best versions. This lead to the discovery that my iCloud photo library was missing a number of months, so I started looking through all of my old hard drives to see what I could find. After moving jobs and upgrading personal laptops over the years, this was a prime candidate for reducing clutter and better organization.

I’ve long battled with music and photo files, but this is my first stab in a long time of trying to get everything at least in one spot for a review of what to keep and what to delete. Just trying to eliminate duplicate folders is a huge step in the right direction. Now that iCloud file storage is (mostly) solid and we have fiber to the new house, I’m consolidating everything in the cloud now. This generally works great with my many devices that can access it, but I do still have concerns about how iCloud manages local disk space (and how I can have local and secondary cloud backups of this data).

This digital clean-up lead to a quick audit of my 1Password vault where I store all of my passwords. I moved all of the old, unused accounts to archive and started to look at the Watchtower feature that goes through the vault and makes recommendations about 2FA, reused and weak passwords and companies that have been involved in breaches. Next up: make sure I have the current recovery key for 1Password in our fire safe (with instructions) and the creation of a new spreadsheet with all of our account information.

Gathering account information lead us to contact our financial planner and finally start the process of consolidating all retirement accounts in one location. That’s another remnant of changing jobs over the years, as I’ve generally tended to just leave 401K money in the original spot each time. Now I’m scheduled to get all of the necessary forms together early next month and move everything under one roof. Also made sure all of these accounts are set to paperless electronic delivery in the interim.

As I worked on these tasks, I looked up at the wooden bill holder and the plastic document holder that I’ve been using to collect paper concert tickets, stamps, gift cards and birthday and anniversary cards. Both were total disasters (and likely haven’t been organized in at least two moves). Spent time with the shredder and a recycling bag to get them both tidy and organized. My old wine jug penny jar that sat next to my desk for years broke outside the stadium years ago and I’d replaced it with a junky paper holder that was overflowing loose coins on the floor. Replaced that with a nice glass container that I moved to my nightstand this weekend.

My home office now just needs a few more things physically cleaned up: the old cables and boxes still sitting on the floor from the move, the CDs, books and DVDs I got from the TPT giveaway, clean out the black file cabinet and get my old X Games skate decks mounted somewhere upstairs. In other parts of the house, I’d like to go through the storage closet upstairs (and put the holiday stuff away), organize the garage (maybe add shelves?) and find a better way to organize my shoes. With kid one moving out soon and kid two shuffling through, it will be nice to clean up some of the random boxes and furniture items that have accumulated since we moved here last year.

Back in the digital realm, I’m trying to clean up and streamline all of our video and news subscriptions via AppleTV, bookmarks and RSS feeds. I recently discovered that I get access to Apple News+ through my AppleOne subscription, which will end up saving me money and give me access to additional paywalled stories at no extra charge. The iCloud organization project will likely take me far into 2023 to complete, but I already feel better about where things sit (plus I was just able to enable Advanced Data Protection today too after getting all of our devices upgraded to the latest software versions). Just hoping they expand the 2TB maximum before I hit that benchmark…