Wesley Sinks

Welcome to the personal website of Wesley Sinks. I work as a marketer and creative problem solver. I have played guitar since age 9. My interest in music, art, and information exchange shapes everything I do. On this site, I write about technology, creativity, and whatever else I learn.

I advocate for free and open source software, created LinuxCreative↗, and currently serve as the Digital Content Specialist (webmaster) at University of Florida Levin College of Law↗. See my work history.

I keep things simple and try not to take myself too seriously. Most of what I know, I learned by breaking things and coming back to fix them. I write about that process and whatever catches my curiosity.

4939 words published this year across 3 blog posts and 3 TILs. See full stats →

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Recent Posts

E-Prime

Writers who employ E-Prime avoid all forms of the verb “to be”, including be, being, been, am, is, are, was, were along with their positive and negative contractions (isn’t, we’re, etc.) Proponents of E-Prime suggest that its use can strengthen writing and clarify thinking. Chiefly, writing in passive voice using E-Prime becomes quite difficult.

#words#habits#writing#speech#psychology

Goofy Mantras

I’ve spent years dabbling in the kinds of things that make you sound a little unhinged at dinner parties: mindfulness, affirmations, sigils, orgonite — the whole hippie-nerd crossover catalogue. I’ve gotten real benefit from some of it and had a good laugh at the rest. But one simple practice stands out: a daily mantra I say to myself. It doesn’t sound profound. It lacks polish. It feels a little goofy. And those qualities makes it work.

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#mindfulness#habits#mental-health#self-compassion#play#words

Building for the Web

I have spent thirteen years building for the web, and most of that time I have not known what I was doing. The useful thing I learned wasn’t how to stop feeling that way — it was how to stop pretending I didn’t.

#code#hugo#wordpress#simplicity#identity#linux#jamstack#selfhosted#freelancing

Flow Disruptors: How Dreams and Daily Choices Reveal What Matters

Dreams can be a window into our deepest feelings, helping us make sense of what lies beneath the surface. But sometimes, they also reveal the hidden distractions that pull us off course in life. Reflecting on my dreams from last night, I’ve decided to call these distractions “flow disruptors.” (No, not the medical devices.)

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#flow#focus#fatherhood#fitness#productivity#javascript#dom

Wordpress 7 Gallery Lightbox Breaks Bootscore-Based Themes

The new gallery lightbox navigation↗ added in WordPress 7 is super cool! However, when a lightbox is opened in WordPress 7, it adds the inert attribute to all direct children of the <body> element. At UF, we used a Bootscore-based WordPress theme (a boilerplate Bootstrap CSS enabled theme), which wraps the site content in a <div id="page" class="site"> (see header.php↗), causing the entire site to go “inert” when the gallery lightbox is opened–not ideal.

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#wordpress#code#javascript#dom#work