Published in Technology on A Place For My Head. Tagged , , & . #9 in the Colophon: Finding A Place For My Head series.

If you hadn’t visited the site since Saturday, the first thing you’d notice would undoubtedly be the lack of Rift. As I mentioned last time, I’ve come to accept it wasn’t the right font for the headings. In lieu of a different choice, what you see right now is Dolly, the same typeface as in the body. I won’t necessarily stick with it, but I must say, I’m very pleased with this one.

By the by, did you catch what I did with the link about the headings font? It takes you directly to the section I’m talking about, because all article subheadings now have permalinks that show up on hover or focus too. There is a debate over the best approach. I’ve used aria-label="Anchor". I’m still contemplating how to move the links outside the heading elements to minimize redundancy—I don’t yet see an obvious solution that doesn’t sacrifice semantics.

On a related note, external links (such as that last one) are now marked with an icon, as is common these days. And speaking of icons, I’ve finally excised all inline SVG from my markup. Now they’re all included via use so they can be cached like any other asset while remaining malleable with CSS.

Bringing order to the icons and their paths led me to simplifying permalinks entirely. You can now find my article React is JavaScript at https://shivjm.blog/react-is-javascript/ instead of https://shivjm.blog/posts/react-is-javascript/, which I think we can all agree looks much nicer. And this time I added a redirect (which wouldn’t work at first because I had placed it after my 404 redirect) so that the untold millions of existing links to my content out there won’t break. I added the link checker just in time to spot the few places where I missed updating my own pages.

Meanwhile, collection pages (tag pages, stream pages & series pages) should all have more appropriate titles and descriptions. All entries should look better in your feed reader as well as on social media. Margins are more uniform and the footer is on every page but one. I won’t rob you of the opportunity to discover for yourself which that is.

On comments

In Comments vs. Responsive Images: A Negotiation, I explained how I switched to Netlify’s responsive image solution in preparation for integrating comments, which I had decided I wanted. Well… I don’t know any more.

I keep vacillating between ‘I want comments’ and ‘I don’t see the point of having comments on this site’. If I do want comments, despite my avowed stance against JavaScript-only content, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to treat comments as optional content and let them depend on JavaScript after all. Would it be so wrong to require JavaScript to view and post comments? If I did that, it would be easy (relatively speaking) to integrate Isso, Talkyard, or Discourse, though I would still have to do the work of hosting them.

We shall see. I don’t feel a pressing need to add them. Perhaps a more permanent answer will become clear in time. Either way, I still have every intention of supporting Webmentions.

An archival strategy

From the beginning, I’ve wanted to implement automatic archival of the website on each deploy. When I looked into it today, I realized that that article’s solution relies entirely on the author’s code to submit single URIs at a time. I neither want to depend on a third party nor want to submit a solitary URI, so I intend to adapt archivenow to save every URI in my sitemap. All it’s doing is accessing an archive.org URI using a headless browser so that the assets are saved as well.

Once archiving my own content is implemented, I’d like to perform the same process on all the external links on my site, in preparation for the day when they inevitably stop working. (This blog will doubtless last until the sun goes dim. I must be prepared.)

Miscellany

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