Meri Leeworthy

Freelance

A screenshot of the Sound Osteo 'about' page

Wordpress Design and Build

I was asked to complete a website redesign for an osteopathy clinic after the previous contractor had to quit the project. I received a short design brief and the half-finished site which was built using Wordpress and Elementor page builder, tools I had little to no experience using. I completed the redesign promply and received the following feedback:

_"Meri has been a dream to work with! Clear, prompt and honest communication, with good advice when dealing with our business that knows nothing about websites. We asked Meri to jump in on a half finished project toward the end of the year no ...

Customising a Cargo Portfolio Site

Performance and video artist Archie Barry asked me to implement a new design for their artist portfolio site. They had had the opportunity to have subsidised access to Cargo, so we agreed this would be the best platform for them to showcase their work. I was asked to make customisations to an existing theme. Here is a screenshot of the Lecomte theme I was asked to customise:

A screenshot of the default Lecomte theme

And here is a screenshot of the customised theme:

A screenshot of the customised theme

One interesting p...

Personal Projects

Element login screen showing an option to log in with Keycloak

Installing Matrix with matrix-ansible-docker-deploy

Steps that I've taken (following this guide)

Set up a DigitalOcean droplet with Debian 11, ssh key linked to my machine, $12 plan (2GB Ram)
SSH in to check it has Python 3 installed (it does)
Install Ansible on my machine
- pip3 install ansible --user
- this installs ansible on my machine but doesn't add it to the path, so cli commands starting with ansible-playbook etc don't work
- following [a post on here](https://superuser.com/questions/1302028/ansible-installed-on-mac-with-success-mes...

A box of metal movable type characters sorted by letter

Design Tokens and Constraint Based Design

This post is based on a presentation I gave while in-batch at the Recurse Center

We tend to take it for granted that when visually styling things on the web, we can make anything any size or colour we like. CSS gives us fine grained control over borders, shadows, animations, accepting arbitrary values measured in many different units including pixels, centimetres, typographic points, average character widths, rem, viewport units, degrees, hertz etc. us fine grained control over borders, shadows, animations, accepting arbitrary values measured in many different units including pixels, centi...

A screenshot of a customised Discourse instance with a search bar in the centre

Customising Discourse to do non-forum things

Discourse is open source forum software that powers most small to medium scale private or special-interest forums nowadays. It's built in Ruby on Rails with an Ember.js frontend.

Before I started learning React, when I only had a very limited understanding of web architecture, I had an idea to install an instance of Discourse and retrofit it to meet Radical Directory's needs. So, this is what I tried to do.

I created a DigitalOcean droplet with Ubuntu 18.04, and learned ...

A historical screenshot of Microsoft Word for Mac 1995

Storing Rich Text

i've been researching a bit about rich text editors and different approaches to storing rich text. It's a surprisingly complicated question so I thought i would post what i'm finding.

Discourse uses (and expected all users to use) Markdown, also giving a preview panel while you are writing posts. The post editor came with a toolbar, that (similar to what Discord does while I'm writing this post) provides shortcuts that help the user use Markdown syntax. The Discourse API gives you both the original Markdown as well as the 'cooked' HTML which I guess it serialises when the post is saved or pu...

a screenshot showing two vertical panels with markdown text on the left and the rendered rich text on the right

Netlify CMS and Jekyll

This post is made up of messages I sent in the Radical Directory Discord, trying to explain the tech to the other collective members

so I did a bunch of research into the platform which I think would, at this point, be the easiest to use to get a functional website set up. when we had the meeting on zoom, i assumed that it would be hard to get the core functionality of the website - the calendar and the directory - working in an effective way. after a bit of research, i think it is not going to be that hard after all and can be implemented on the platform that I was proposing to make a s...

Work