Last round of blog updates (… for February)

Introduction

I can’t believe how many changes I made in the past month on this blog considering that I didn’t really work on it for years! Each previous time I set up the new tool (Nikolas, Jekyll, …) and never touched it after. I believe I spent more time this previous month on this blog than almost since it’s creation 13 years ago.

I’m not sure how long it will be the case, I will run out of ideas at some point (read previous post), but for now I’m still at it! And not only do I play with the code of the site itself, but February is a new record of post within a month too (13 with this one, almost 1 every 2 days!!), so I did write and not just play with the code :).

I also reworked from scratch the deployment process, but I’ll talk about that next month.

TLDR;

So on top of previous updates, this last release includes:

• Better content classification: I reworked all posts categories and tags
• Article now show the categories next to the tags
• Modified linkding tags so they match the ones from this blog, so bookmarks and other posts are tags with the same bookmarks and can be linked together (Ongoing effort)
• Leaner homepage (see below for more info)
• Improved taxonomy vocabulary page (eg: tags) and taxonomy term pages (eg: dev tag) (see below for more info)
• Some tweaks to the theme (see below for more info)

Some Details and screenshots!

Homepage weight loss

The homepage, while already lean, has lost more “weight”. I removed some of the text that was making the page too bloated. Description of content types are now only on the listing page itself, not above the list anymore.

Starting from this:

I decided to:

• Remove intro text for each section. It is still displayed on listing page with all details, just not on the homepage anymore
• List “featured” blog and gemlog articles on the homepage, not just the latest 5
• List only 3 bookmarks instead of 5
• List only the last updated static page instead of 5

And now we have:

I find it easier to read through the different parts. When clicking on the listing pages, the intro is there to give access to the RSS feeds or other links. I just kept the “Gemini browser” warning just to avoid confusion with the gemini:// links.

Grouping content on taxonomy pages

I changed the tags and categories pages that used to list terms with dates for no good reason (except an error from myself) to do that. In screenshots:

Before:

After:

Also, the term pages show all content tagged with the term, but grouped by content type (and still in reverse chronological order), as shown below.

Before:

After:

Article page

As said, the article page now have the categories displayed next to tags as show below.

Also, the contact message wasn’t very visible, so now it is highlighted a bit at the bottom of each article page for better visibility.

Header

Something always bothered me in the existing theme: the fact that the “slogan” (the greek text in the top right) was not vertically centered with the site name (top left). Also, it wasn’t great on mobile. For info it looked like this:

Old header in large screen:

Old header in small screen:

But now, thank to CSS flex properties, it is both centered and displayed a bit more nicely in smaller screen:

New header in large screen:

New header in small screen:

Footer

Similar to the header, I changed the footer so that the copyright is now on the right and the links on the left, using flex properties to display them nicely on both large and small screen:

Old footer in large screen:

Old footer in small screen:

New footer in large screen:

New footer in small screen:

Until the next changes!

I’m soon going to write about how I implemented some of these changes (mainly the featured selection and the term page), and I’m sure I’m going to find other ideas to implement in the following weeks / month, so stay tuned!

Also, feel free to reach out to indicate if you prefer the before or after version, always good to hear real feedbacks :).