Non-fenced code fragments (using backticks in Markdown) will now be
formatted with a background color, padding, and a border. I was
avoiding this for some time, but most of my writing also didn't have a
whole lot of code in it. That's changing with the article I'm writing
now, and it really is much more clear with this styling; it can
otherwise be more difficult than necessary to tell where a command
starts and ends, and the monospace font can sometimes be too sublte of
an indicator for shorter text, or text that uses characters that are
harder to distinguish.
The article I'm working on makes (very) heavy use of the `details` HTML
element, and nests them. Making sense of the article without
indentation is difficult and torturous.
This has complicated the prefmt script enough that it really ought to be
extracted into something else. I'm admittedly disappointed that I've
had to do this much work with it, because it completely sacrifies any
hope of portability. Oh well, that's not even a design goal, though
it'd be nice to be able to have the preview of Markdown files make sense
in e.g. Forejo.
I figured I'd have the least numbre of problems with nesting if I strip
whitespace prefixes based on the current level of nesting. To avoid
surprises, I enforce expectations statically---it will not compile
without proper nesting.
To reduce the potential blast radius, I'm doing this only for `details`
for now; it'll expand later on. I did diff the output of older articles
to make sure they were unaffected.
I previously included hard-coded CSS. Pandoc will apparently generate
what is needed for the page, but I didn't have that included in my
template.
I chose Tango out of a nearly 20y personal preference now, ever since I
used the Tango Icon Theme in Ubunutu Dapper Drake (6.06), my introducing
to GNOME/GTK. I might have used Breezy, too, I don't recall.
Prior to that I think I used Mandrake (before it was Mandriva), which
was the first distro I tried, after my laptop's HDD died and I was
awaiting a replacement (couldn't run Windows without a HDD).
...anyway.
This removes the cgit configuration and added redirects. I'll check the
404 log and determine if I should add others in the future, if it's
worth the effort.
Figures will have margins on the left and right sides by default, unless
explicitly denoted "inline". The caption will also be a lighter typeface
rather than bold. When the figure caption appears at the bottom, it will
have a top border.
This increases the headings, gives them slightly larger margins, decreases
the font size for footnotes, decreases the line-height, and lightens the
weight of the font. I think this makes it easier to eyeball the different
sections (especially in the article I will be publishing shortly), and
further helps to emphasize that the footnotes are subservient to the text.
The idea here is to provide as little CSS as is sensible for the initial
page load to be styled in a layout similar to the final layout. This
initial styling may be briefly visible on a slow conection.
Slow connections can happen for a variety of reasons. For example, I'm a
Tor user, and connection speeds vary. Mobile connection speeds can also
vary wildly.
This adds a few hundred bytes, but I was able to cut it down quite a bit,
and I don't find this to be unreasonable relative to the other data on
each page.
I only noticed this issue because my work computer has IE11 installed. I will not be
supporting it. Edge works just fine and IE is just about extinct, finally.
Of couse, I recomend using a free/libre browser.
Rather than displaying the hash separately, this just makes the date a link
to the source code. Until I display a modification date, this will also
make it easy to see the history of the file.
This website honors the user's default font settings (both to be kind and
for accessibility reasons). Consequently, the responsive layout is based on
character units (ch) rather than pixels.
This goes back to Open Sans, which is what I was using previously.
I really like Source Sans Pro. Unfortunately, the font rendered far too
small relative to other sans-serif fonts, which caused an unpleasent
experience for both slow page loads (e.g. over Tor or slower
connections) and for users with web fonts disabled (e.g. via NoScript).
Further, the font is huge: the WOFF is over 100KiB per font, and I was
using regular and light versions. Open Sans, in contrast, is <20KiB per
font, allowing me to use Regular, Light, and SemiBold and still be about
half the size of the single Source Sans Pro Regular.
As a bonus, users may also already have Open Sans installed on their
system.
I settled with WOFF instead of WOFF2 for browser support.
The site now looks pretty close on fallback, which is good. For
example, I use DejaVu Sans as my default font, and it even has a Light
version that renders correctly.
As with all resources on my site, I host this from my own domain rather
than via Google's servers. That means that the font won't be cached for
users when they first visit the site, but that's okay---privacy is more
important.
I should note that, since I use NoScript, I almost never load web fonts
for other sites. But I still wanted to try to provide a consistent look
across systems for those who do wish to load fonts.
I didn't originally intend for all of this to be in a single commit. But
here we are. I don't have the time to split these up more cleanly; this
project is taking more time than I originally hoped that it would.
This is a new static site generator. More information to follow in the
near future (hopefully in the form of an article), but repo2html is now
removed. See code comments for additional information; I tried to make it
suitable as a learning resource for others. It is essentially a set of
shell scripts with a fairly robust build for incremental generation.
The site has changed drastically, reflecting that its purpose has changed
over the years: it is now intended for publishing quality works (or at least
I hope), not just a braindump.
This retains most of the text of the original pages verbatim, with the
exception of the About page. Other pages may have their text modified in
commits that follow.
Enhancements to follow in future commits.
With the CC BY-SA addition, the line of images would otherwise wrap. The font
size is adjusted slightly to be more proportional with the images.
The images dimensions are reduced by 20%.
Mike Gerwitz
Mike Gerwitz