Recent Website Changes


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The State of This Website

Over the years, this website has changed URLs, styles, content focus, and much more. However, it seems that I am never done, as I am yet again changing this page to fit my current needs and wants.

While this site was already minimal (~12kb), it contained a lot of disorganized content and some poorly chosen color schemes.

The recent updates attempt to fix these items while focusing on what I truly care about here: the content within each page.

Recent Changes

I've made quite a few changes to the style of this website today, both in the CSS and in the HTML.

Here are some of the key takeaways from today's changes:

  1. Reduce the width of the website from 60em to 40em.
  2. Remove breadcrumb navigation and replaced with a simple "Return Home" link when visiting anything other than the homepage.
  3. Remove syntax highlighting from code blocks. CSS now loads from a single file.
  4. Move blog posts on home page to the top, pushing tertiary content down.
  5. Update font-family from monospace to sans-serif for readability.

Future Focus

Accessibility

My main focus amidst all of the changes this past year was accessibility. I tried to improve accessibility of all pages on this site as best as I know how. For example, I added aria labels to identify different navigation menus in November.

I want to continue this in 2023 and learn more about the accessibility features I can utilize to help those who may need them.

Content First

Beyond accessibility, I am making a concerted effort to bring the content of this site to the forefront and push the tertiary information (e.g., About Me, Services, etc.) down below the content.

Further, I want to review and edit previous blog posts for grammar, accuracy, dead links, and more. Where necessary, I may even add a blurb at the top of old posts that are no longer accurate or helpful.

Style

As always, I will be searching for ways to reduce distractions and bring a minimalistic approach to this site. While there are certainly more drastic measures I could take, such as making this a Shinobi Website or a No CSS Website, I prefer to keep some modern features here.

Two ideas have been floating around in my head, but I am not sure how I feel about these approaches yet:

  1. Going all-in with Emacs org-mode and creating a script to auto-publish all my blog posts from org-mode to plain HTML files and then letting my CSS style it after the fact.
  2. Focus on publishing for Gemini or Gopher and then utilize a conversion program to translate the pages to HTML.

Looking Back

As I sit here and finalize the changes, as well as this post, I am happy with the current state of this website. It's certainly a long way from my first attempts (parallax background images, anyone?) and it's good to see the progress.

I can only hope and work hard to ensure that I make more meaningful progress by this time next year.