It's almost impossible to keep track of all the wonderful tips and tricks about CSS, because hardly a quarter goes by without new functions being introduced by the W3C and browser manufacturers. I diligently collect everything I can find in order to try it out at some point, but I hardly ever get round to it. If you feel the same way … here are a few more gems for your pile … :)

• A Fancy Hover Effect For Your Avatar
• Mixing Colors with CSS
• CSS Proxied Variables via JS (css-proxied-vars)
• Resetting Inherited CSS with “Revert”
• Solved: Tricky Floating Image Alignment
• CSS Blurry Shimmer Effect
• Scroll progress animations in CSS
• Speedy CSS Tip! Animated Gradient Text
• imagehover: CSS hover effect library for images
• Scrollbar.app

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Over the last few years, I have taken a lot of photos in the garden of my neighbour and friend Thomas, many of which I also use here on the blog. Thomas is a gifted gardener for me, being completely clueless in this respect, and he has a very clear idea of when to plant what and where in the garden. So you don’t have to look for him at weekends, because everyone knows where he is … out digging.

Not only does he choose his plants carefully and look after them with dedication, he also dares to experiment along the lines of “I’ve always wanted to see if I can grow <insert any complex Latin name here>”. The results are usually phenomenal and this year I’m trying to photographically document the seasonal cycle and as many plants as possible in a series.

Here we go … April 2024

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It’s weekend again and my SV Wehen-Wiesbaden, promoted to the 2nd Bundesliga last season, have to face a legendary German club: 1. FC Kaiserslautern, against whom we won 2:1 at home in the first half of the season. But now away, in Kaiserslautern, in the no less legendary Fritz Walter Stadium! And I’ll be there this time …

Fritz would have had his fun with the weather, at least some of the time: the sun and rain alternated on Saturday in typical April fashion. The meeting point for the away trip was at 09:30 at the Wiesbaden stadium. In addition to the obligatory buses of the Ultras and the fan clubs, the 26er Club had also provided 2 buses and sold tickets to the club members, and since I will miss the last two home games in May due to my vacation and Kaiserslautern is only a 1-hour drive, I had to be there. A total of 9 buses were on the way to the second last away game of the season. Quite impressive for the rather fan-less SV Wehen-Wiesbaden. Now, I didn’t know a soul, but it’s easy to make friends among fans, helped by the fact that the average age of my bus was around 50, because the youngsters tend to tick differently. But fun was guaranteed in our “senior shuttle”.

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I still owe you the game from the weekend, in which most people probably had little expectation because it was at home against Fortuna Düsseldorf, who are currently in the relegation place for promotion to the 1st Bundesliga and are managing to keep HSV, my favourite club from my youth, at bay. Daniel Thioune, one of HSV’s many former coaches, and his squad had something to lose and he will have set them up accordingly before the game.

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Everyone collects a lot of things over time. This applies to the basement at home, where old coffee machines in their original packaging (they’re still good and I might need them again), 3 generations of old laptops, boxes of cables (power, CAT, HDMI, USB, VGA, you name it) and the like pile up in a corner or even cover an entire area. Honestly, when was the last time you tidied up there?

But this also applies in particular to the digital legacy that we produce every day, especially if you work in IT. It’s no coincidence that the Windows Explorer, macOS Finder or Konqueror under Linux are often used to start our daily digital work, and it’s also no surprise that there are so many different file managers available on the market.

But many people don’t give much thought to the organization of the files themselves. IT professionals often have a similar situation on their hard disk to the florist who only has half an hour in the evening to transfer a few smartphone pictures to the computer until the children have to be looked after. Everyone has a rough, self-made system, but all too often we simply throw a few vacation pictures into the Documents folder because the booking confirmation is also lying around there and we don’t have the time to sort everything out. “I’ll do it tomorrow/on the weekend/on vacation. “ … has really never worked.

I am a fairly structured person, which means that disorder is nothing for me, or, as the main protagonist of a cult American TV series in Germany likes to say: I am Monk in this regard. The very first thing I do is repartition all my machines and create a D:\ drive for “Data “, into which I move the standard Windows folders Documents, Pictures, etc. Within folders with time-related content, for example “Photos”, I create subfolders with a date in front, such as “23-12 Adventure Vacation on Mars” or “24-03 Diving in the Himalayas”.
In “Documents “, on the other hand, I usually use the context of the organization to which the files are to be assigned for the subfolders, such as “Insurance Without Luck” or “Money-Away-Bank”, or the content type of the file, such as “Receipts “ or “Manuals “ If it is only a single file, I like to do it without subfolders. There are not many ;)
To have certain subfolders in view more quickly, I often use a prefix such as the hash or underscore character, i.e. something like “#MyCompany “ or “_Screenshots “. I also like to double them if there are too many underscore folders and a certain folder is very, very, very important.

You will have already noticed … “structured” my ass!
I keep reaching the limits of what is reasonable with my “system” and it has happened to me more than once, that when I copied an old disk to a new machine I had I had duplicate and triplicate data, in different subfolders or completely different structures, because I had been working with both machines for a while or for other reasons.
And … I’m ONLY talking about files here all the time. A look at my online mailbox reveals similarly frightening and, above all, untraceable data, not to mention data from online services of all kinds!

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The best ideas always come to you at the most inopportune moments and places. Whereas you used to grab a piece of paper and try to capture the idea in illegible handwriting, today it is often a mobile app or a desktop application into which you hammer the most important key points. This change has advantages, as not a single tree needs to be chopped down for the many ideas that are produced every day and the digital scraps of ideas can later be changed, refined, formatted and processed in other ways very easily. But it also has disadvantages, because the range of digital helpers is so large that you always have the feeling you’ve backed the wrong horse. One app can do this, but not that, while another can do that, but is only available in the cloud, where you don’t know who is reading what, and the third can do all that, but is only available with an expensive subscription. There’s always something. Paper, on the other hand, is always paper…

Even though I still do a lot of handwriting on paper, simply because it is often much quicker, I have acquired an amazing zoo of different digital helpers in recent years (I work in IT anyway), all of which have a specific purpose but are more or less not interoperable with each other. This is on the one hand because a suitable tool for me is not available for a different device class or operating system and on the other, because the objectives of the tools differ, as you not only have ideas that you want to capture in text, but also have to deal with tasks, collections of links, research texts, code snippets and the like.

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Matchday in Wiesbaden! On Easter Sunday! I managed to convince my wife to drive home a little earlier from our visit to her mum so that I could get to the stadium on time and watch SV Wehen Wiesbaden pick up the all-important 3 points against bottom-placed Osnabrück. At least that was the plan…

We have a disappointing relationship with Osnabrück from last season, when we were in second place in the 3. Bundesliga and were overtaken by them shortly before the finish line and had to go into relegation instead of being promoted directly, so it was satisfying to have won the first match away from home last year. The second match now in our arena was supposed to follow the same pattern and Bärbel, myself and the other (only) 6,135 spectators were in good spirits. Except, of course, for the handful of opposing fans who had travelled from Osnabrück.

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My wife is a childcare worker and looked after a small number of the Wiesbaden-based dwarfs aged 1 to 3 until 2022 with some very nice people, all of whom I had the honour of getting to know. Although almost all the staff from back then (like my wife) have since moved to another workplace, we are still in good contact with some of them. This includes Denis Durban, a very interesting man in his mid-thirties with Russian roots, Korean relatives and a big heart, which is probably why he landed in childcare.

In Germany, and probably in many other countries too, it is common practice to give jobs that deal with dead things such as money, machines and the like not only a higher social status but also a significantly higher salary, whereas all jobs that centre around people are given very poor attention. You really have to want to be a nurse, geriatric nurse or child carer and be willing to accept the poor pay and conditions. I don’t know why this is the case, but when my wife or Denis talk about their daily struggles with facility management, colleagues, parents and also children and I realise what salary levels they are in, I feel pity and sometimes also anger. So it’s no coincidence that in this job not only the sickness rate but also the staff turnover is immensely high. The fact that hardly anyone wants to do this under these circumstances means that you can quit your job at any time as a childcare worker, for example, because you’ll have a new one the next day anyway, as ALL organisations are desperately looking for skilled staff.

However, many turn their backs on the industry out of frustration and look for a new professional field. So I didn’t find it surprising that Denis told me at some point that he was fed up and wanted to give his second passion, IT, more room in his life and perhaps turn it into a career. He asked me for advice on the best direction to take, because he knew that I’d already been in IT for decades and hadn’t intended to do so from the start. I’m an industrial clerk by background and in the 90s, a time of massive IT growth, I slipped in front of a monitor (still amber-coloured at the time) without much prior knowledge and simply stayed.

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