Stay In Lane

The photo and title are unrelated.

I’ve been itching to redesign this site for a while now, and finally started to do so. At least three different ideas were almost fully realized and then scrapped. I am very bad about this.

As I was digging in, though, I started to notice that I was doing some things “wrong” in Hugo (the static site generator that builds this page.) I also started to notice a lot of accessibility issues. Nothing major, but there were a couple of things I was not doing and a couple of things I was doing that wasn’t necessary.

So the other day I decided to (once again) scrap all of the styles, but this time purposefully set up a very simple layout to get started on fixing things from the inside out. This worked well, and now the site is in a usable state. I can start making posts again and stop worrying about how it looks.

Some things so far

• Made the Now pages a section of posts. Mainly for archiving, organization and maybe RSS. I’m still unsure on this. Maybe it should just be its own page, but I like the idea of archiving too much.
• Made Links a section of posts rather than using Pinboard. The idea here is to roll them into RSS. Either one big RSS feed or separate everything into individual feeds. Or both!
• Used Hugo menus properly so that I can add them anywhere and loop over them.
• External links are now accessible
• Removed unnecessary role properties from landmark regions

Future (maybe) things

• Convert the journal section into a photos section, and then create a section for smaller posts. Similar to Colly’s secondary 'stream' of posts. Having different post types is starting to make me feel like I’m building my own custom Tumblr page. I kinda miss Tumblr. I know it’s still there, but I’m not interested in using it anymore.
• Add all of my books to Library Thing and pull in books with their API. Or just make a yaml file of my books and loop over that. I sort of want to stay clear of APIs in case they change something.
• Revisit adding some sort of gallery or favorite photos page. Or maybe a proper portfolio? I’m not sure just yet. I don’t really have “work”, just a bunch of snapshits.

The possibilities of a personal site are endless. You can do as much or as little as you want.