Week 34: £137,000

I’m posting this early because it’s Charlotte’s birthday on Sunday and I’m gonna be pretty busy all weekend. Today (Saturday) we’re going to see her dad and brother for a meal, and then tomorrow we’ll be drinking a lot of Champagne and playing mini-golf.

Wednesday marked 15 years since my dad died. We’re rapidly approaching the point where I’ll only have known him for half of my life, which is wild. Becky (sister) and I had a nice phone call and chatted about it, it definitely impacts us less year on year which feels sad somehow.

I went to view my flat a second time, and have renewed excitement about the whole process (it’s lovely). I have a solicitor, mortgage application stuff is happening, I was very happy until my first mortgage application got rejected due to Halifax’s maximum borrowing amount. Oh well, onto the next lender!

Since I moved to London 7 years ago I’ve paid ~£137,000 in rent. Trying not to get too annoyed about that.

I played Catan for the first time in years, I forgot how unbalanced it can be (especially with 5 players). I came second, which I’m happy with.

My website tweaking continues, this week I spent a few evenings on and off implementing search! It was a fun challenge because this is a static Hugo website; I had to get creative.

• I decided an acceptable fallback for my site’s core experience was a Google site search, so if JavaScript doesn’t load for whatever reason you can still find stuff relatively easily. The search box (in the header up there ☝️) by default sends your query off to Google with a sitesearch=rowanmanning.com parameter.

• For the enhanced search, I decided to try out Lunr to index and search my content. Hugo is super powerful, I hacked together a JSON content type for my home page which is just a dump of all my site content. I lazy-load this JSON when someone uses search to keep the initial page weight down and create an index with Lunr.

• For the displaying of search results, I used the Government Digital Service Accessible autocomplete, it’s so well put together and I found it painless to set up (well done GDS team). I custom styled it to fit in better with the rest of this website.

• I set up a couple of keyboard shortcuts (try typing / or cmd+k) using Hotkeys.js – I initially tried building something myself but then realised something stable and well tested made more sense.

• All of this is the first JavaScript I’ve added to this website, and everything still works without it 👍

I started working on a longer-form blog post about implementing Webmention, it’s going to be quite a big read I think 😬 - hopefully chee is OK waiting for a while.