Changelog

Tracking the changes I make to this website, mostly for my own reference.

2022

Sep. 18

  • Changed the Design nav item to read Projects instead
  • On the Reading List, added a little footer linking to my other media pages, and a by recommendation of for books where a particular person inspired me to read it.

Sep. 9 (continued!)

Added tags pages. I used to manually create a small number of them, and then removed them during a past redesign. This time, they’re automated with the pagination feature.

I’m now reaching a volume of posts where more organization would be good, so I’ll probably keep tinkering with this.

Sep. 9

Adjusted my watchlist to support individual post pages. Currently, the list is just a bunch of JSON entries; if I wanted to expand on a particular entry, there wouldn’t be space to do it. So:

  • Create a new post type for media entries, which sits inside /media/watch/post-name.md
  • Add a "url": "/media/watch/post-name.md" line to the entries that I’ve written expanded posts for
  • Link that in the main watchlist, if applicable.
  • Example: made my first post with The Sandman

This was inspired by a couple of things:

  • I added a new ‘currently watching’ section the other week, but I wanted to be able to add my thoughts throughout the process of watching xyz show. Writing a review only when I completed the thing seemed too sparse.
  • I was thinking about this post on book clubs by James Somers, where he argues that the value in book clubs is in how you discuss the book throughout the whole process of reading it, not just at the end. Extrapolating this sentiment to TV—I think this makes a lot of sense, since there’s a lot of content, and my thoughts from episode to episode evolve. It would be a shame not to capture those.
  • I was also thinking about how fun it is to read reddit discussion threads after I’ve watched something, because it’s fun to read the reactions to specific things. It’s fun to see what a stranger thinks about something, because maybe you had that thought too. And so on.
  • When I stumble across someone else’s media diary, I look for works that I’ve also watched/read/etc., so I can see what they thought of it.

Anyway, trying to make it personal. My movie reviews feel pretty cold and unsubstantial, but I don’t want to encourage that.

Aug. 24

  • Added a ‘currently watching’ section to my watchlist.

Aug. 10

Aug. 9

  • Deleted a bunch of designTM content, because truthfully, I hated it. It is gone! Banished. Trying to restore this site to something I enjoy rather than begrudgingly populate.
  • Refactored some things. It’s still a mess. I talk about some of it in Markdown Optimizations.
  • Created my Media Diary page.

Jul. 11

  • Added a featured project to the design page, which is currently my site redesign.
  • Trying to figure out how to highlight what I want people to read. My redesign blog post is unpolished and not Fully Presentable Case Study, but I do want people to read it.
  • Floundering in dislike of my site design and wanting to redesign it again. As one does. But rereading my own post reminds me that I’m pleased with a lot of things about it, even if presently I’m unable to muster up those emotions.
  • ???

Jul. 1

  • Added a reading list.
  • Wrote a brief writeup about this.
  • Switched out the Games section with this reading list on the homepage.

Jun. 30

  • Added a Past Designs page, as a more abridged version of this changelog page. The emphasis is on big visual redesigns.
  • I’ll probably redesign this page (lol).

May 11

  • Another redesign!!! Published in a state of incompleteness, because I’ve been punting it around for too long and I just need to publish it at this point.
  • Light mode, once again.
  • Changed fonts back to Tiempos Text/Display (I must use the font license I paid for) and Inconsolata
  • Other credits: sparkle svg by Monika Michalczyk; syntax highlighting bastardized from Prism.js
  • Lots of stuff is still broken, mostly in the depths of my blog archive. Don’t look at it.

Mar. 11

  • Removed my visual novel from the homepage.

Mar. 1

  • Restyling. Changed to dark mode: green, pink, more green.
  • New typography: Be Vietnam Pro + Neue Machina + Space Mono.
  • Refactoring how I do some images. Change to <figure> from <div>. A lot of stuff is still in disarray. I’ll get to it.

2021

Nov. 30, 2021

  • Fixed formatting on sketchbook section.
  • Started adding books to my media diary, as if I read books. Hahaha.

Nov. 29

Updated media diary page to fall in line with my layout, instead of doing a completely different page layout.

Struggled with getting a custom filter to work, to limit the number of items outputted from a collection. It seems that passing parameters with Liquid doesn’t work? I consulted this thread and ultimately assigned a new variable with a fixed filter.

Nov. 26

Restyle my design and journal pages to be a table list to allow for easier skimming, since the volume of Stuff is growing.

Nov. 21

Created my visual novel site. The normal site is still accessible. I wrote a long post about this. My journal list is growing, so now I’m considering restyling it into a more compact list to allow for skimming.

Nov. 19

  • Restyle the watchlist a bit, because the narrow columns were annoying me. I might make multiple styles to pick from for this page, since I keep flip-flopping between wanting text-only information density vs flashy large posters.
  • Start migrating my games content to its own collection.

Nov. 16

Pushed a new redesign. Not everything is polished, but what the heck.

  • New fonts. Old: Inter, Span, Odisseia. New: Tiempos Text and Headline, Hatton, Inconsolata. Unsure if I’m going to continue loading this many fonts.
  • Light mode!
  • Different header styling. I had to redo how I styled a bunch of containers, which revealed a bunch of shortcomings.
  • My spacing is messed up again. I think I need to figure out a different, maintainable way of doing this.

Nov. 5

Messing around with my media diary.

  • Designed a completely different media page that is probably bewildering to land upon.
  • Built out a simple music page, which pulls from a json data file, because I’m all about that now.
  • Considering changing up my site design again. Light mode??

Sep. 21

Add movie posters to my watchlist. Unsure if I like this or not. Restyled mobile views to make it non-ugly, and I still don’t like it.

Set the following in my config file, which solves my tagging problems. Lol.

eleventyConfig.setDataDeepMerge(true);

Aug. 23

  • Added star ratings to my media diary using js. Idk, there’s probably a better way of doing this.
  • Highlighted current page in nav bar. Also implemented in a not very smart way.

Aug. 20

  • Added categories for the journal. Not really satisfied with this yet, because it relies on manually creating pages that pull from a specific tag. Also, not all my posts are categorized. Eventually, some stuff here will split off into more of a digital garden, once I figure out how to structure that.
  • Moved ‘watchlist’ notes out of the journal and into a media diary. Instead of creating a new post for each movie, this now pulls from a JSON file. I think this might be easier to manage since my entries will be short and frequent.

Aug. 11

Added back a sketchbook section, with different styling. I used to have a combined ‘artwork’ + sketches category, but I didn’t like it. I’m not satisfied with ‘artwork’ as a category to begin with, and dumping sketches in alongside more polished work felt out of place.

Aug. 4

  • Redesigned the homepage and blog archive list.
  • Removed a bunch of stuff from the nav while I revamp that as well.
  • Added a ‘notes’ category which is meant for more microblogging type things. Starting writing stuff about movies.
  • Added a photo diary post, to bring back my previous photo diary efforts.
  • Figuring out how to handle other journal posts that aren’t really journal posts.
  • Changed body font to Inter (previously Trade Gothic Next).

Jan. 31

I added a digital garden and moved my code reference page there. This is a static collection with normal posts in it.

2020

Dec. 27, 2020

  • Added back an Artwork section, and put up some old art. This is intended to work as more of an archive rather than a “portfolio”—which means I shouldn’t be trying to curate it to show only the best stuff. But I do want to add some kind of filtering in the future. I removed the ‘sketchbook’ page.
  • I’m not sure if I should keep the art posts separate from their corresponding blog posts (if it exists) or not. I don’t like the duplication.
  • Changed the work page to a design page. I’m still dissatisfied with this though.
  • I changed some CSS that might have borked my vertical rhythm again. Haha.

Dec. 24

  • Added a References page. Initially it was to store boilerplate code (namely, an HTML page skeleton) and then I decided to add some CSS snippets, and then some links I frequently refer to.
    • Not sure if this will be useful yet—I’ve made this kind of reference page before a couple of times, and I ended up never using them. But we’ll see, if it’s moot again then I can just yeet it off my site.
    • (I’m trying not to overthink whether or not I should do something and just do it. And if it doesn’t work, then I can undo it. That’s the whole point of building this website myself.)
  • Not on this site, but: I changed my VS Code editor theme. It used to be Horizon and now it’s Base16 Ocean Dark Extended, which is the theme I used to use in Sublime a couple of years ago. It’s such a classic. I also changed my font from Consolas to Anonymous Pro. It feels very different and I’m not sure if I like it yet or not. I think my dislike of change is clouding my judgment, so I’m going to give it a week or so.
  • Changed my blog archive styling a bit. I wanted to add excerpts, but I don’t want to write useful excerpts. Haha. Another time.

In the more abstract: I added a few more lines to my homepage about the site and my plans with it. I saw this tweet today that made me think more about how I should truly personalize my site. I built it but it still does feel quite cold, because I don’t get very personal.

Building on this, I have also been looking at others’ personal sites. There were a couple of standouts I found that really emulated the kinds of things I want to do, and they also had acknowledgement pages that cited their inspirations and peers. And then there was just like, no women cited. So. I should just keep trucking along on this and not feel doubtful about whether or not this is “worth” putting out into the world, for the representation or whatever.

Dec. 19

  • Removed artwork section, moved the posts to Blog. I think I will eventually put an art section back but the posts currently fit better as regular blog posts.
  • Fixed my horrible vertical margin issues, which I hope are mostly resolved now.
  • Styled the <pre> block.

Dec. 13

  • Refactored the syntax for my post grid, in order to accommodate my newly migrated Seattle blog post which uses grid based on aspect ratios for images.
    • Priority: markdown/HTML that is easier to write, instead of verbose markdown/HTML and efficient css (wow this sounds horrible to type out)
  • My margin collapse status remains in disarray and I am pretending not to notice it

Nov. 14

  • Added swashes to page/post titles, which also required making them titlecase instead of my previous all-lowercase aesthetic.
  • Added artwork category and Drifter post
  • Refactored post markup to use css grid, based on this blog post. This unfortunately introduced a lot of spacing problems because margins no longer collapse, but I am too tired to deal with it today 🙃 the perk of this method is that my markup/markdown is less verbose, despite the more annoying css.

Nov. 7

Added support for a Table of Contents. This works by:

  • Setting toc: true in the post’s frontmatter
  • The npm plugin markdown-it-anchor adds an id to every heading tag based on its text (from this blog post)
  • Using JavaScript to pull all the headings on a page and generate a list with anchor links, which is inserted at the top of the post.

I updated my blog layout to be left aligned instead of centered, which allows for more space to be used for asides and the TOC.

Oct. 17

Added support for <aside> margin notes. This is a hacky implementation involving:

  • HTML: a wrapper div around the paragraph and the aside
  • CSS: absolute positioning the aside to display it in the margins

My original idea was using float: right on the <aside>, except this required that the aside come before the paragraph it referenced, which is semantically incorrect. I found this detailed post on sidenotes by Gwern Bran­wen that compares and examines how different sites do sidenotes.

I scrapped my initial goal of being able to sync up sidenotes/footnotes and decided to just go with asides as sidenotes that would exist relative to a paragraph, and footnotes would be used for reference links or more independent things not tied to a specific place in the text.

I’ll probably revisit this usage in the future as I add more blog posts.

In design notes, I swapped out green as a complementary colour and replaced it with lilac, and drew a little pixel controller for my migrated 2020 games post.

Oct. 13

Added a sketchbook page. Ideally this will be a dynamic collection that can serve as a canonical source for my sketches (or similar quick artwork).

  • why: I post these on social media, where it then gets lost over time. If I wanted to point people to some series of [whatever works] I made, there wouldn’t be a clean way of doing it (‘oh here are ten different tweets of mine’).
  • structure: I know from my previous ‘photo log’ attempt that having a new post per sketch/photo is too labourious, so it’s more sustainable to have a post containing multiple sketches.
  • content and metadata: each post would have a name and description. Each sketch within a post would have an img, alt text, and caption. A post can contain multiple sketches. Should a post ever contain only one sketch?
  • organization: How I’ll group things together will depend on how I anticipate I might reference them in the future. For example, my current Hades sketches collection seems more relevant than having an October 2020 sketches collection.
  • currently: my sketchbook page is just hardcoded HTML, because I wanted to get writing the markup out of the way. I’m thinking the structure would either be looping through a collection of posts, or pulling from a JSON file.

Added this site notes page. I wonder if it will be helpful to publicly record my thinking process behind things?

  • Unsure if this would work better as an actual collection of posts, rather than a static page I update—depends on how often I end up using this. If it keeps expanding with long blocks of text (like today’s log), then it might work better as proper blog posts.

Oct. 10, 2020

Launched! 🎉 I transformed my old static site of two HTML pages into an Eleventy blog. I had set up a dummy blog an entire year ago and then didn’t do anything, so I built on top of that. I migrated the one post I had on my old jekyll blog (RIP) that was somewhat presentable, and drew new tiny pixel art graphics.