If you’re one of the handful of people who read my blog, you may have noticed that I hadn’t posted yet in February. You see, about a month ago, I decided to implement that neat trick some people are doing that allows them to use replies to a mastodon post as comments on a web page. While I could have lifted Juhis’ implementation wholesale and been done in a half-hour, naturally, I decided to complicate things and build the feature using web components.
As if this wasn’t enough, I figured that my site could use a bit of sprucing up. I began with changes to the typography; surely, I thought, this would only represent some minor changes to the CSS! Alas, I came across a link to utopia.fyi and decided to implement fluid space and type scaling. I found this rather confusing at first as utopia.fyi is pretty unclear about exactly how this works, but I got it working nicely in the end and I was even able to remove my media query in exchange for one small container query, which it seems we can safely use now.
I also decided that I was sick of how crowded my font folder was, so I replaced the lot with two beautiful variable typefaces that only require one font file each for a slew of styles: Manrope and Fraunces.
To make a long story short: I rendered my website unusable by taking on too much at once. Could I have switched branches and uploaded the odd post? Surely, just like I could do my taxes the minute I get my W2, or I could get more exercise. In any case, I now have a prettier, leaner website with:
- Mastodon comments
- Fluid type
- Two variable typefaces instead of two giant font families
- Zero breakpoints
…and I’m fairly chuffed. Some things I plan on doing in the future include:
- Styling for blockquotes, including optical margins
-
Fixing styling for images that aren’t in a
<figure> - Better styling for code fences
- Implementing an image gallery
- Creating a /uses page
- Doing some of this stuff, and/or this stuff
- Finally getting around to making a professional site for my work accomplishments, et cetera
It feels good to have a working site once more. I’m very excited about these changes and keen as mince to get posting again!
