6.0.0
The website has a new version. We re-wrote everything.
Version six. Where six is more of a hunch than any sort of science. (I’ll do a brief history of the site in another post.)
Why?
The old content was a few years old, and it was showing its age. This system evolves: with me, with time, and as you – my community – discover new stuff.
That sounds schmaltzy but it’s true. Especially in the past year, since I’ve had more time to spend on this thing, the forum and Discord have taken off. Your ideas all make their way back in to the system. Thanks.
Then we wrote a workbook, recorded a workshop, and created the first Quick Start pack – in that order – and they all subtly changed how I think about this thing.
So everything needed to be brought in to alignment, which is what we’ve done. We’ve drawn all the examples from the ‘life admin’ pack, so it’s a cohesive story.
Lucy wrote much of it
I write a lot of words. Then Lucy – a professional editor in a previous life – tells me to delete most of them. This hurts, but she’s right.
This time round, she wrote much of the new content.
Like I said last time, I consider the 10-19 Conceptssection of this site to be the canonical Johnny.Decimal user guide. I love how focused this version is.
We agonised over every paragraph. ‘Kill the widow’ is Lucy’s favourite game: if there’s one word on its own line, you need to find another to delete to bring it up.[1]
(Blog posts are where I’m let loose to ramble. Don’t blame her for any of this.)
The index is now your JDex
This is big. I’ve been looking for inspiration for a while, and obsidian_starcaller called it.
JDex is brilliant. It recalls Rolodex, starts with ‘JD’, works as a noun and a verb, and basically doesn’t exist as a term online. It’s genius.
Berkeley Mono all the way
In line with this feeling like a manual, we replaced the old body serif font – IBM Plex Serif – with Berkeley Mono. It’s now the only font we use.
I adore it. Lucy’s idea. Why didn’t I think of it?
We draw constant inspiration from the Berkeley site. When we wonder how to make something look more like a 1970s NASA manual, we go there and stare for a while.
Berkeley is really reasonably priced. Fonts can cost a lot more than this. We love Neil and his work: please support him if you can.
Dark mode is first-class
The site’s dark mode is really sweet now. There’s no toggle on the site: it honours your system setting.
With v6, all (new) images have proper dark mode versions. If the source app has a native dark mode, that’s where the image comes from. If it doesn’t, I’ve applied a colour filter and brought the luminosity down.
I don’t use dark mode myself so feedback on this ‘hack’ is welcome. I know the contrast suffers; there’s not much I can do about this. I’ll fix up the old images, all of which are in blog posts, over time.
Layout tweaks
The ‘Location’ box above the main content was cute, but it didn’t work very hard. That’s been replaced with a new box that shows a table of contents for the page. Nice.
Behind the scenes
You know when you go to the dentist and they give you a full scrape and you come out and your teeth feel sharper?
That’s what I did to all of the back-end code. So it’s now much nicer to work with. This will allow me to make more changes more quickly in the future.
Should I read it all?
I think you should. It won’t take long, and it’ll bring you up to speed.
And when I find a typo?..
There’s got to be one, right? It’ll kill us but hey, we’d rather know about it.
First accepted typo gets a Johnny.Decimal sticker.[2]
Thank you
Thanks for being here. Without you, there’s no point. As always, we’re here to help. Let us know what you need.
– johnny & lucy, aka ‘jucy’
