Published in Technology on A Place For My Head. Tagged , & . #6 in the Colophon: Finding A Place For My Head series.

I’ve been so busy making improvements and adding content from my notes, I haven’t had time to write about making improvements and adding content for a few days, so here is a review of what’s changed. (One thing that hasn’t is that the email address at shivjm.in still isn’t functional. Domain.com claims to be working on it.)

Stylin’

The first thing you should notice is a visual coherence and consistency that was missing from the beginning. Until now, I’d been setting padding, margins, and sizes on a whim, merely guessing and nudging. On Wednesday, I established a single unit of spacing that I’ve come to like and rephrased everything else as (sometimes fractional) multiples of it. In some cases, the adjustments were minor, such as moving from 1rem to 1.125rem. Yet, the effect was drastic. Everything snapped into place.

Next, I turned my attention to the long-neglected mobile experience. I accept that not everyone reads this site on a 32″ 4K monitor as I do. I may have done things backwards, as I first looked at the homepage and posts in isolation to tweak all their components and remove a great deal of wasted space, then searched for a suitably reduced spacing unit for smaller screens. Nevertheless, I’m pleased with the result. I devoted a not insignificant amount of time to gently refining the sizes for certain components to avoid awkward line breaks. I also increased the base font size on both smaller and larger screens.

Writing and rewriting

I added a new kind of entry: music stuck in my head, which initially had a much longer style of permalink. I only just simplified it.[1] I don’t expect to post more than one a day on average.

I revised all of my existing writing except for the ‘Thoughts & Spoilers’, which I’ll edit tomorrow. Much of it was first or second drafts, assembled and rushed to publication while distracted. In my drafts proper, I have a lengthy review of a recent event that I’ve been working on since the beginning of April. I think one last editorial pass ought to do it.

An embarrassing realization

What’s wrong with this picture?

A screenshot of two posts on the homepage.

Nothing, right? How about this one, from a week later?

The exact same image.

I lied. That was the same image, because the times, they aren’t a-changin’. These are static pages, so using relative times is… less than ideal.

Typography

I must find a different font for my headings. While I like Rift as much as I did a week ago, I concede that something else might fit better in my head. In any case, I’ll have to abandon Adobe Fonts if I want to self-host the files and get rid of the cascading imports, which I most certainly do, so I should explore my options.

I can implement a consistent typographical scale, too, once I have a more lasting choice of font.

Miscellany

I really have to decide whether I want to add comments. I want interactivity. I don’t want to yell into the void and not have the void troll me back. Comments are so complicated, though, unless you just hand them off to Disqus, which you know I won’t do. I can tell you that the day I implement (or make the decision not to implement) a commenting solution is the day I can stop saying the site is being built in the open.

Still to come

Before I go, I won’t lie, it’s fine if this is how people discover my site:

Google Search Console showing two impressions for the keywords ‘javascript sucks’.

Stay safe out there. Work is my only refuge from a terrifying reality.

  1. I know Cool URIs don't change. I’m giving myself a grace period of a month while I build the site to establish my, er, permanent permalinks. After all, you, my dear reader, are still fictional.↩

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