Friday, October 13, 2023

Commented on Eleventy performance improvements. Set intention for an ugly website.

Today's Plan

• Done Improve daily log template
  • Add hard-coded breadcrumb (I tried the eleventy navigation plugin and it did not look very automation-friendly, at least not to a beginner.)
    • Note: Instead of doing a breadcrumb, for now I am going to put a link to the Log index at the bottom of the page. Later this can be part of the pagination nav menu.
  • Move top-level header to template
• Done Start writing about the project I hope to achieve during my batch at the Recurse Center

11ty v2 Performance

A year or two ago I had worked with 11ty previously for my craft-and-math website, but it was with 11ty v1. It was very helpful, but I was frustrated by how hot my laptop would get while I was running Browsersync. With v2.0, there is a faster, custom-to-eleventy dev server, and I don't even notice it's running. Things go much more smoothly!

On Choosing To Be A Little Ugly

I am refraining from diving into the CSS of this blog right now. Pure HTML can be a little ugly at times, but it has built-in responsiveness and accessibility features. I think that's worth a little ugliness. I want to make sure to be careful that I am not accidentally undoing those features while making aesthetic 'improvements'. In time, I will likely add some subtle CSS tweaks, like making the pagination nav element horizontal and hiding the (semantically important, visually distracting) <ol> list decorations.

I try to refer to Seirdy's opinionated and thorough Best practices for inclusive textual websites when making a design decision. My previous website (about art) is very heavy on visuals. I am excited to experiment with the inclusivity of this blog, which is a primarily textual website.

Task Ideas

• Look into pagination for log entries. Can I have a little "Latest, Next, Previous, Oldest" menu at the bottom of the page, like webcomics all have?
• I want the day of the week visible. I wonder how hard that would be.
• Add tags to log entries like project:blog or project:information-games so that they can be automatically linked to project pages later, when I have project pages.