web-goddess

Month: January 2025

  • Shared today on Facebook

    Some fun stuff happened in the past week: I caught up with multiple friends (including my amazing old Canva buddy Auguste Levanaite along with her husband Sean and baby Lucy); I was interviewed on a tech podcast about early retirement (I’ll share when it goes live); I had a great chat with a new mentee; I sewed myself a new pair of shorts; and Rodd and I finished up our volunteering at the Sydney Festival. The final event we supported was Vigil: Gunyah at the Barangaroo Reserve. We got to hear from three amazing First Nations women talking about self-care, staying connected with community, and how you can keep fighting even when the problems you face are systemic and too big for any one person to solve. I found it really inspiring, especially after a week when tech companies are deleting the diversity sections of their websites and kowtowing to bigots and xenophobes. I’m proud to have helped out with this event and the Festival, and happy to contribute to making Australia (and the world) a more vibrant, tolerant, welcoming place.

    (And yeah, I will continue to minimise my time on this website going forward. Feel free to bookmark my website https://www.web-goddess.org if you want to know what I’m up to more regularly.)

  • Bailee shorts

    Bailee shorts

    I need more shorts, I realised recently. Maybe I didn’t notice because I was working last summer? Anyway, it’s time to make some shorts. These are the Bailee shorts from Tessuti, and I made them in leftover fabric from the tiki wiggle dress I made 8 years ago. I had just enough material, though I did have to rotate the pockets and waistband off-grain. As usual with Tessuti patterns, they were mostly great but with a couple perplexing instructions. For example, the waistband piece is a long rectangle with a fold indicator on one short side, but the cutting diagrams show the long side placed across a fold. Well, which is it? If I do that, it’ll only be half as long as it’s meant to be! I followed my gut and did it the way that makes sense, but it was annoying. Anyway, they turned out wearable, which was all I wanted. The fabric is quite a thick cotton – almost a stretch sateen – so they don’t really drape, and they’re really more like Hawaiian shorts. I’ll do my next pair in a drapey linen to see how they compare…

  • Auguste!

    Auguste!

    We had a wonderful time today catching up – for the first time in YEARS! – with my old Canva friend Auguste, her husband Sean, and their baby Lucy. We visited several fine Marrickville watering holes… 🍻

  • Sydney Festival complete!

    Sydney Festival complete!

    We finished our Sydney Festival experience for 2025 tonight at the volunteers’ party down at the Thirsty Mile. The Festival team put on food and drinks for us, and the CEO thanked everyone for all their hard work. We got to meet the new incoming Festival Director Kris Nelson, and we even got special certificates! This was a really fun experience, and I’m glad we were able to do it.

    A crowd listening to the Sydney Festival CEO speak

  • Vigil: Gunyah

    Vigil: Gunyah

    We had our final Sydney Festival volunteering shift today down at Barangaroo Reserve. We supported the “Caring for Spirit” talk as part of the Vigil: Gunyah series of First Nations events. It was very inspiring to hear from three smart, passionate Aboriginal women about how they support each other and their communities, and how they maintain their fire in spite of setbacks. (Very relevant to the world right now!)

    Vigil: Gunyah talk at Sydney Festival - a crowd of people watching three Aboriginal women speak at Barangaroo Reserve

  • Migrating Instagram Posts to WordPress

    Given, you know, everything, I’m looking to move away from Instagram and consolidate everything I’ve posted there to my WordPress blog. Has anyone come across a good way to do this? It doesn’t look like anyone’s done a plugin or anything like that. I have a rudimentary plan, but thought I’d check in case anyone has already solved this…

  • Hamilton reaction

    I saw this video linked on Bluesky a few days back, and I’ve spent the last two days bingeing the series. I’m almost up to the end. It’s great! This young guy is a rapper and a music geek who nevertheless hates musicals and somehow hasn’t ever seen Hamilton. He watches a couple songs at a time, pausing to react to what’s happening, call out motifs that are repeating, and analyse how the writing illustrates character. Needless to say, he ends up loving it and gets fully invested in the story. His enthusiasm is infectious.

  • Sinkhole

    Sinkhole

    Apparently a Hellmouth has opened on Grafton Street in Chippendale. That seems appropriate for this week.

  • Facebook detox

    In addition to demonetising my Meta data, I’ve decided to take a break from Meta platforms this week. It turns out that it’s surprisingly difficult to log out of Facebook Messenger on your phone, to the extent that I had to dig up a Wikihow article to show me how. Even after I managed to log out of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and Threads, they kept showing me a single-click “log back in” option due to some saved profile, which I then had to delete. The fact that they make it so damn difficult kinda reinforces my decision, to be honest.

    The only one I haven’t signed out of is WhatsApp. This is solely because my main friend group uses it to communicate, and I haven’t yet figured out how to convince them all to move to an alternative.

    Why just a break? Why don’t I delete my accounts? The temptation is definitely there. Sadly, FB remains my main channel to keep up with my family and friends in the US. It’s where I see what my brother and sister-in-law are doing with their cafe this week; it’s where I see whatever dodgy Jeep memes my Dad is laughing at; it’s where I see whatever quilt show in the Midwest my Mom is supporting; it’s where I find out if my college friends in LA are still safe. Instagram is literally the only way I know what’s happening with my young nieces and nephews, who would never be so crass as to text me or talk on the phone. It’s hard. I suspect the way forward will just be to cut my usage way, way back, and to move towards a read-only method of interaction there.

  • Shared today on Facebook

    I have to know some Amazon CloudFront experts who have experience with WordPress, right? 😉 I’m having an issue with my personal site. When I set it up, I used the official AWS for WordPress plugin to create my CloudFront distribution (best practice at the time). Guess what? The plugin has since been abandoned, and I’m now having caching issues. As far as I can tell, there is/was zero official AWS guidance on migrating away from the plugin. Anybody encountered this issue before? More info over at my site…

    Problems with WordPress and Amazon CloudFront

    Signing out of FB and all Meta products for the next week. You can find me on my website or other social networks if you need to…