Potential Website Improvements

by . (updated

Website "itches" I want to scratch.

  • 2021-06-07T12:44:14-0700 CSS optimization https://reading.supply/@jim/a-set-of-tactics-to-ensure-fast-css-object-model-creation-iCoP4G
  • 2020-12-23T22:18:52-0800 follow gwern's example Book reviews are sorted by star, and sorted by length of review within each star level, under the assumption that longer reviews are of more interest to readers.
  • 2020-12-21T18:40:36-0800 design and CSS to study, steal https://ethanmarcotte.com/about/#start https://manazir.org/newsletter
  • 2020-12-21T12:16:49-0800 use granary.io to provide an RSS feed, quick and easy
  • 2020-12-02T22:34:24-0800 https://thelounge.chat/docs/usage
  • 2020-10-25T23:41:48-0700: https://instant.page/
  • 2020-10-01T13:17:45-0700 SUPREMELY UNIMPORTANT Add XML friend network to at least one link, for funsies https://gmpg.org/xfn/join
  • 2020-09-24T17:20:46-0700 glean from style, cover catalog at https://deeden.co.uk/reading/2008/
  • 2020-09-21T15:18:51-0700 document submission/creation times for Sith Lord Challenge entries
  • 2020-09-21T13:03:00-0700 Turn "full" (vs "truncated") designation on Favorite Poems into structured data, for use in template that positions small-font full/truncated over the top-right of a blockquote :^O oh yeah oh yeah
  • 2020-09-20T20:14:53-0700 Glean tips on design, color scheme, and layout from Ru Singh's blog.
  • 2020-09-18T16:24:11-0700 - authenticate with a web app while serving media from a static file server
  • DONE find somewhere to use Bennett Feely's CSS gradients
  • make my Arduino blink when the site gets an HTTP request, a la this project
  • (2020-09-05T13:47:48-0700) Make names of individual SLC Lords into h3s with a class/style that makes them stand out
  • Fix the issue of P tags adding additional margin inside LI tags (example: the Links entry for "Chinese Text Project")
  • Try ripping off some mobile design from Plastic Bag
  • Borrow the menu which changes at small screen sizes, from Umvirate
  • Add template: "share this post" with permalink URL (a la Tantek, Derek Sivers)
  • Change "WIP" class to be regular text against a red-shaded callout, since red text may be illegible for many against my background color
  • DON'T DO THIS: This is a solved problem; the right solution is not to waste time solving it myself, but to finally migrate to a proper CMS or application server, which will handle this and a hundred other fiddly details for me. [for webpages generated from other pages' data, with no corresponding source document: rewrite build script to only regenerate these if the underlying data has changed.]
  • experiment with making the size of blog links relative to each entry's wordcount. Some cutoffs to try: 25 or fewer words; 26-100 words; 101-250 words; 251-500 words; 501-1000 words; 1001-2500 words; 2501-5000 words, 5000-10000 words; 10001 or more words. [Create a distribution of my post lengths to find the 5 20%-wide clumps.]
  • add rel=canonical links to all pages. make sure those are HTTPS links, not HTTP ones. follow the guide stored in docs folder.
  • OUTDATED build website on a build server; be able to trigger rebuilds by posting to a certain endpoint (and/or with a long-running process watching source files and starting a rebuild when sources change)
  • add p-summary class to appropriate paragraphs, typically some or all of the intro section
  • (2020-03-24) Use the resources at these links to implement responsive, lazy-loading images https://responsivebreakpoints.com/ https://css-tricks.com/tips-for-rolling-your-own-lazy-loading/
  • (2020-03-22) I finally found a solution for always centering poems: they need to be wrapped in <div class="center">.[^5] However, if I do this, when the article bodies are copied to the generated Poems index, they remain centered, which makes them look weirdly out of line with that page's headings and timestamps. I want to keep poems left-aligned on the index while centering them on their own pages. One solution would be for the centering div to be applied in a template only used for individual-poem pages, but Hakyll makes that more work than it should be. I think I'll suffer through off-center individual poems, and deal with this once my rendering/templating is saner.
  • turn Glossary/Books word lists into HTML definition lists, and experiment with CSS
  • once Glossary itself is published, turn Books word lists into just words, linked to full in the Glossary
  • standardize on an HTML structure (and corresponding CSS) for representing Chinese lexemes in running text (e.g. 朋友 peng2you3 "friend")
  • in posts.py, log a warning if bodytext.line contains "(www". That string is almost certainly the beginning of the URL in a Markdown link; such a link should have the http:// protocol at its front, as without the protocol Hakyll will render that link relative to maxwelljoslyn.com.
  • add a "shop" where you can purchase dubious services with the world's strongest currency, Hills of Beans
  • add a calendar. v1: include holidays I care about, like Old Year's Eve.
  • automatically add height and width annotations to each image, allowing browser to speed up HTML rendering by laying out the page before images are fully downloaded.
    • service/product/tool: Emfasten by thume.ca?
    • search posts for img tags matching a regex for "doesn't have height and width attributes". (something like "move backward through the file, and if you find then record the region from that point until you find " .... luckily images can't be nested)
    • build a map :: Post -> [Img]
    • use ImageMagick (or just stat?) to nab image size
    • write the image tag back to its original location
  • write post-upload script to do WebMentions and other stuff with on-site URLs
    • use Selectomax (sp?), the faster-than-beautiful-soup Python HTML library, to extract URLS, anchor tags, links
    • feed all of them to something like webmention-tools for discovery and sending
    • HTTP GET all of them to see they're all there (want to never again have the problem I had with broken Ryan Quest images)
  • make Books into a collection following the Poems model
  • OUTDATED write Emacs function/command to insert link with my choice of mf2 classes
  • DONE 2020-10-01T00:02:26-0700 set Micropub server's default post creation time to be in Pacific
  • DONE is my word-count program accidentally double-counting the texts of my poems, by including both /poems/index and each individual poem page? Answer: no.
  • DONE create template fragment tag that inserts my email with a mailto link (with optional parameter for mailto "?subject" attribute)
  • DONE (with all the ones that matter) redirect the handful of permalink URLs I messed up when I switched from /blog/yyyy/mm/dd/X to /notes/yyyy/mm/dd/X (see email). Effect: just tidying up. April 2020: redirected the old note URL sent to Chris Aldrich about his formatting error, and the blog post link I sent to Tyler Sullivan.
  • DONE 2020-04-07 improve differentation of H2 and H3 tags
  • DONE reverse my Books page so that the newest entries are at the top
  • ALL DONE (see here) make Poems into an indie "collection"
  • (DONE '(time 2019 03 ??)) add comment support for non-IndieWeb people by integrating Comment Parade (possibly with Quill as the authoring interface), a la this example from Kicks Condor [^5]: What I don't yet understand is why some poems are centered without having to do anything else, e.g. "Esther" is centered as I would expect. Whether centering does what it "ought" to do (pshaw!) seems to depend on whether an HTML tag comes before the <pre class="poem"> element.