JS Naked Day🔗 happened this week, and as usual, I’m fashionably late. I decided to permanently remove a significant portion of the JavaScript from my site as it was affecting load times. There wasn’t a whole lot of JavaScript to begin with, which made this pretty easy to implement. What I did have was the following:
1. A script to randomly select from an array of quotes to display in the sidebar on each page load
I just removed this as I just wasn’t finding it amusing anymore. Maybe it will return later, who knows? Certainly not me.
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Man, my one blog post per week goal sure fell apart quickly. To avoid going too long without a post, I figure I’ll give a quick update on what I’ve been working on. Over at the 32-Bit Cafe, we announced we are expanding into a Discourse forum🔗! I’ve been spending a lot of time setting it up and working alongside the rest of the mod team to get it ready before the February 15th launch. This weekend, I was able to find some time to work on projects, though. I built a PC for my partner, which they have been enjoying! It was a much needed upgrade over their old system, which was a frankensteined build made out of the core of my first PC build from 2015. I also spent some time working through Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment🔗. I’m working on the first homework assignment, which is a simple program that copies a file. It’s been a fun challenge and I’m learning a lot. On the fitness side of things, I haven’t made much progress yet. I actually took the week off from the gym because of a combination of sleep issues and hurting my back, but I’m feeling a lot better now and will be back at it tomorrow! While the first month of 2024 hasn’t gone quite to plan, I’ve been keeping busy anyway.
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I recently read fLaMEd’s post discussing the shortcomings of linking techniques frequently used on the smallweb, such as link pages, webrings, button walls, etc. Many websites on the smallweb employ these techniques in order to connect to other stops in the smallweb space. I don’t think they are inherently bad, of course, but the context matters a lot. I want to know why the webmaster has chosen to put these links on their website, even if the explanation is as brief as “these people are my friends and their websites are cool.”
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Web 1.0 revival is pretty popular these days in the smallweb circles, but one aspect of it should have remained in the grave: the 88x31 button.
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I did a complete overhaul of the layout of my site. When I launched my website a year and a half ago, I designed it while under the influence of web 1.0 nostalgia. With this redesign, my goal is to better use the amount of screen space PCs have these days, while also making it easier for the content to be responsive on mobile.
The links page has been revamped as well. As much as I enjoyed hiding the link descriptions until hovered, it makes for a poor experience both on mobile and for screen readers. Recent discussion about web accessibility of the smallweb in the 32-Bit cafe🔗 Discord server prompted me to rethink how I wanted to present the content of my website, especially on a page as important as my outgoing links page.
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For the past year, this website has been generated using some Go code I wrote, which was fun while it lasted, but it got to the point where every time I wanted to add something I would have to hand-code the new feature, which resulted in my website never getting updated. So moving forward, I’ve gone back to using Hugo as a static site generator. It’s been a great experience so far, converting my old stylesheets into a Hugo theme has been quite easy. My custom-built site generator is a project I’d like to revisit in the future, but for now ease of use takes priority.
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