Deprecated and removed the somewhat ambiguous id:: substitution reference in
favour of slug:: so that it is always clear what a reference will be
substituted with. This change also obviated the need for the misc:: handler,
so that was culled from the code too.
Changelog
I have begun keeping a sporadic list of things I change on the website as a timeline/chronology of the evolution of this site. This is primarily for my own use so I can quickly glance back and glean some context about when and why I might have made a change. I’ve opted to post it publicly to the site in case anyone else finds it interesting.
Made created a required metadata element, removing previous behaviour whereby
it could be omitted and auto populated using the published field.
Switched from separating YAML metadata in a for loop, to using the Python Frontmatter library.
Added dependency: Python Frontmatter
Removed dependency: PyYAML
Replaced author metadata element with creator as I gradually formalise the
metadata terms used in my own infrastructure. creator generalises much better
to a broader media set. For example: if I’m referencing a video then author
does not make a great deal of sense.
MILESTONE 100,000 words! Here, on this little site of mine. Six figures of attempts at speaking.
Added the lightgallery library to the site for multi-image galleries, replacing my previous self built solution.
While I slightly mourn adding a dependency, it’s all self-hosted, and the resulting lightbox is much more robust and suited to the growing audience of this site.
Added pillow-heif to build requirements to support compressing/processing HEIC
images. For the time being HEIC/HEIF images are turned into JPEGs as browsers
don’t natively support them.
Fix: Non-modal images no longer appear clickable via cursor and opacity shift
Dropped Cloudflare.
This site was previously hosted via Cloudflare Pages, today I migrated back to a server that I control.
Switched from markdown to Djot (See SEP 13: Switch to a more reasonable source markup language) for lightweight document markup. Djot offers many conveniences in terms of consistency and reasonability.
This change required syntactical tweaks be made to virtually all documents, but the pay off in terms of having a thoughtfully considered, simple, robust syntax feels significant.
In Djot raw HTML has to be explicitly declared. This has numerous advantages, again mostly having to do with predictability. No longer is it a guessing game as to whether output will be mangled or needs escaping.
Speed of HTML generation has been improved despite a rough implementation that currently shells out to an external Djot parser (Jotdown) as there is no Djot parser currently written for Python.
Not logging a specific change, simply recording here that the average full site build time now exceeds 2.5 seconds. This is with a total of 84457 words published to the site across 5 document types, 17 document classes, 28 document tags, and with 182 internal links between documents. Not any kind of problem, but thinking long term it makes sense to finish implementing SEP 35: Incremental builds in order to maintain the tight, iterative feedback loop of revise/rebuild that works so well for me.
10:52:29 Imported modules in 0.143 seconds
10:52:29 Setup environment in 0.0 seconds
10:52:29 Defined functions in 0.0 seconds
10:52:30 Ingested documents in 0.552 seconds
10:52:30 Inserted substitutes in 0.139 seconds
10:52:31 Generated HTML in 1.191 seconds
10:52:31 Built backlinks in 0.003 seconds
10:52:31 Built collections in 0.002 seconds
10:52:32 Wrote out HTML files in 0.403 seconds
10:52:32 Built feed stylesheet in 0.002 seconds
10:52:32 Built feeds in 0.129 seconds
10:52:32 Built sitemap in 0.003 seconds
10:52:32 Copied assets in 0.015 seconds
10:52:32 Processed assets in 0.015 seconds
10:52:32 Built in 2.604 seconds
Implemented the first incarnation of document transclusion, allowing me to include whole documents from within other documents.
Removed hand drawn lines introduced a year ago, they only add clutter.
Comprehensive metadata overhaul. Implemented the — long ago proposed — document types to the site taxonomy, as well classes.
MILESTONE 75,000 words on the site.
Fixed footer to bottom of viewport. Besides being more visually consistent when documents are short, also allows for paging between short documents (changelogs, nonsense, etc) using the navigation links in the footer as they are always in the same place (unless a document is longer than the view height).
Partial rewrite, significant changes to major subsystems.
Overhaul backlink extraction in order to drop BeautifulSoup as a dependency, (See ✅ SEP 16: Extract backlinks from plaintext). New system works on the plaintext documents directly which offers greater flexibility, consistency, as well as being lighter and faster.
Add collision checking (✅ SEP 14: UUID collision checking) amongst UUIDs, necessary for several reasons including effects on SEPs 12 and 16.
Add insert_substitutes(): function for all pre-processing of plaintext prior
to HTML conversion. The major component within is currently the implementation
of internal UUID referencing.
Overhaul build_html() function into a new, leaner, simpler generate_html()
function made possible by the changes above.
Secondary benefit: 30% faster builds
MILESTONE 50,000 words published on the site.
Implemented stylesheet cache-busting by appending the MD5 hash of the stylesheet as a [URL query string].
Fixed backlinks not all populating due to KeyError
Added a /humans.txt page. Had come across them before, but credit to Dave Gauer and his humans.txt for prompting me to add one of mine own.
Added the Inter font, prefer it’s spacing and readability. Currently only supporting WOFF2 as unsupported clients can always fall back to system defaults. My only gripe with Inter is I feel its italic type is much too subtle for a sans-serif font.
Added ‘breadcrumbing’ to all leaf posts, making it easier to navigate ‘back up the tree’ of a series or return to parent category.
Integrated some art that I admire into the ‘hub’ pages of the site.
Added nonsense, my little tumblog/twitter/microblog/stream of unconsciousness page, another room to fill with words and noise.
Removed handwritten font face, realising that it doesn’t suit my design principles, chiefly my desire for a cruft-free reading experience.
Reverted change to feeds made on Mar 20, 2022.
Take silasjelley.com/feeds/notes for example, why not place its feed at silasjelley.com/notes/feed? In that example I agree that the latter structure is just as elegant and useful as the former. But what if I want to create arbitrary feeds such as a feed that combines the notes and glossary collections? Where would I put that? Situating all feeds beneath silasjelley.com/feeds allows for taxonomical freedom. In this case: silasjelley.com/feeds/notes+glossary.
Crossed 25,000 words published on this little post-it note of a website.
Added a handwritten font face to be used for <time> elements.
Added a questions page containing a few questions I would love to receive other people’s input on.
Introduced hand-drawn-style lines for underlines and horizontal rules to break up the hard edges of the site.
Changed feed path URIs from the form /feeds/collection to /collection/feed to make them more intuitively discoverable.
Added a page to guide visitors in how to use this site.
Added a now page, cribbed from Derek Sivers.
Added search to the site.
