Blau's Blog

Welcome to Blau's Blog 2.0!

Date: [20th Sep 2024]
Categories: [Site Updates]

I feel like I've been talking about updating this for forever, and it uh. I think I generated this new Jekyll folder in late May, so it kind of has been! I've been chipping away at it, alongside writing, scrapping, then re-writing the new Kinzart website¹ for the better half of the year, but Cohost announcing that it's shutting down at the end of 2024² kind of pushed me into gear to finish updating this so that I have somewhere better to put my long-form posts and guides rather than trying to break them up and put them on Mastodon. Plus, they're public here. My primary page on Cohost is only visible to logged-in users³, which is comfortable, but not very helpful if you want to actually share what you're writing.

Right! So what exactly changed? Aside from, you know, all of it.

Posts

The first time around, I didn't really want anything to do with posts on Jekyll. I wanted a Static Site™ with no Blogging attached. I figured I could just get away with doing everything in Pages and not Posts. Which, yeah, that worked out alright for the first round. But in carving out and ignoring everything to do with Posts, I also ignored Collections (which, in Jekyll, Posts and Drafts are technically just specific inbuilt Collections), which in turn meant that the code for my old Eldritch Cat page was absolutely atrocious. Instead of writing a loop in liquid to go through a collection and build the page based on the results... I just copy-pasted the same chunk of code over and over until it came together. It was not great. The formatting was even less great.

But! With the new version, I not only finally bothered to learn about Posts, I also learned how to use Drafts, so I'm not forever trying to remember to keep a draft post unpublished and manually setting dates, and also how to use Collections to help make generating other pages much easier. The new Eldritch Cat main page looks a lot like the blog index here because it's just using the same liquid loops to build the list. It's much easier this way.

Sidenote: How often am I going to post? I have no idea. I would like at least one post per week, but I know from past experience that holding myself to an expectation of "X posts per Y time period" does not work, it just makes me feel bad for missing my "deadlines". We'll see!

RSS / Atom

Relatedly: There's now an RSS / Atom feed! You can use the link in the sidebar to grab the XML and add it to your favorite feed reader.

This should send out full-text posts. You may need to tell your feed reader of choice to grab full-text and not just the excerpt or summary.

Wait, there's a lot of missing pages

There were a lot of pages on the old version that I feel could be better handled as posts. Most of my Second Life modding, glossary, tools, etc pages fall under that. They'll be linked to under the Second Life page when they're ready to go. Same with the Cool Stuff page, that'd work better as posts. And the About page, there's a bunch of stuff in the old one that I'd like to flesh out a lot more sometime.

Also, specifically, my open source Second Life scripts are going to have their own Collection (like my Eldritch Cat stuff does now), but I'm also planning on mirroring them to Github, or some equivalent thereof.

The Eldritch Cat item pages are super barebones right now, with mostly just links to the Marketplace, a vendor image, UV maps if needed, and the info notecard. I'm hoping to flesh these out a bit more at some point but that's pretty much all the critical information they need.

I was going to make pages for my characters, but I've got Toyhouse and my Furrcard to handle those, so I might pass for now. I'd like to set up a little gallery for my art from way back in the day - I don't draw much anymore unfortunately, and I've deleted most of my art in various site moves - but not entirely sure if I will yet.

Also the Credits page is pretty basic and I'd like to do something with it but I don't know exactly what yet.

Stuff I still want to do

I wanted to get this site up and running before Cohost goes down. I had most of the site's code together in a very basic state, so it didn't take terribly long to get it fully ready to go, but there are still some features that I'd like to add.

I'm looking into joining a webring, for one. I'd also like to add some goodies to the sidebar - some buttons, maybe my last.fm recently played like I had on Cohost.

I'd like to add a little "author blurb" at the end of each post, the code for which isn't hard, but coming up with a condensed few lines about myself is.

The mobile layouts are functional but I need to add at least one more breakpoint (the screen size at which the layout changes) for tablet screen sizes. I'd like to improve the look of the menu toggle buttons on mobile - right now I'm just borrowing the code from W3Schools. It works, but I'd like to make it look a little nicer. There is also a way to do this purely in CSS⁴, but I wasn't able to get that to behave.

I want to add alternate site styles (a light mode version, at minimum). This shouldn't be too difficult; the hardest part is probably going to be deciding where to put the toggle button (and how to make it remember, because I'm one of the weirdos who prefers dark themes but has Windows set to light mode).

I need to set up a thing with Font Awesome to pull in some of those icons. Relatedly, I also need to finish the code for infoboxes, so I can mark things as e.g. Tips, Info, Caution, Warning, etc. A very basic version of this is currently being used to handle Content Warnings at the beginning of each post.

Also, fonts. I think the font setup I have right now is alright for now (the "Industrial" font stack from Modern Font Stacks) but there's another font that I would like to switch to sometime. I'd also like to have a different font for headings, smalltext (e.g. image captions, post time, etc) and regular text.

I'd like to set something up for asides, but I'm not sure how I want to handle the styling for those yet, so for now you get a zillion footnotes. I mean, there will still be a zillion footnotes even with asides. You know how it is.

I'm still undecided about adding a comments section to my posts. On one hand, getting feedback is useful. On the other hand, it's another thing I have to manage, and I want to make this as smooth as possible for me to use, so that I... you know... keep using it. If I do, I also have to figure out a provider. I've seen folks use a system that turns Mastodon/Fedi replies into comments, which is cool, but I don't want to only have people on Mastodon/Fedi et al be able to comment. Alternatively, I could use Disqus, but I want to look more into that before I commit. (There is also Giscus and a few other things that use Github Issues to handle comments, but I'm not hosting this on Github Pages, and I honestly don't know if I'm going to be using Github forever, so I don't want to tie myself down to that.) I recently also learned of Comentariothe meantime if you have something specific to mention to me the best place to do so is on Mastodon⁵.

I'm also looking into adding Goatcounter for analytics. Neocities doesn't really give you a lot of information beyond just "views"⁶; Goatcounter would give me some more fine grained (but anonymous!) information, especially about specific pages.

Speaking of Neocities, I don't plan to host this site on Neocities forever. I have a static site set up and ready to go on NFSN, where I'm hosting the new Kinzart website. For the time being, I plan on staying on Neocities, partially because it has a little social aspect that'll make it easier for old Cohost folks to find this site. That, and when I move to the new host, I'd like to get a proper domain set up to go with it, and I'm famously slow with coming up with names (the one singular good idea I had taught me that blau.blog would have been almost $200/year because it's a "premium" domain, likely because Blau is both short and a dictionary word). Whenever that happens, there'll be plenty of fanfare to make sure folks know where the site's gone, and the Neocities account will stay put, even if it's just pointing at the new domain.

I'm also undecided on setting something up to automatically share new posts to Mastodon through RSS feeds or whatnot. I might just manually share them for the time being.

(Also I want to get a couple of stickers of Blau to sprinkle through these posts, but that may take a bit! I might just draw some myself, depending on whether I get some spare time to try that soon. I have so many projects. So many.)

A specific note about accessibility

I still have a lot to learn about improving accessibility on websites. I mean, I didn't know what ARIA was until a few days ago. I've done what I can with what I know how to do right now, but there's definitely a lot of room for improvement. I recently picked up NVDA Screen Reader for testing and am learning how to use it but advice from folks experienced in their use is very welcome.

Anyway, I think that about covers it for now. Good to be back! Or, well, here now. You know what I mean.