Some blog updates

Recently, I spent a bit of time improving again this small website and thought it would be good to highlight the changes, as well as write about what I want to do next here.

Published changes

Content Statistics

First, I’ve fixed the content statistics pages that were right for the first 4 months of a year and then off by one month. How did that happen? Well, turns out I forgot a month in an array in the bash script generating the data… That was silly and not easy to find at first glance so took a bit of old school printing debug to find the stupid mistake. If you want to learn more about how I generate those statistics and graphs for this static site, read the blog post about it!

I also removed the bookmarks from the statistics as I didn’t believe it was interesting enough or adding enough value. It was adding “noises” instead in the global graphs, so gone they are.

Responses from the community

I’ve added a way to (manually) add links to external blogs related to an article. It will be use mainly for responses to something I wrote or to highlight some article part of a discussion I’m participating in.

I’m not going to detail much more here as I have a dedicated post in draft explaining everything, but you can see the results at the bottom of this or that page.

Printer Friendly

I’m going to write a dedicated post for this too, but I decided to make this website a little bit more printer friendly, and in particular blog post page. Not sure it will be used by anyone but it was easy to do.

It is far from perfect but good enough for a first attempt :).

Feature Posts

On the homepage, I’m listing the 5 more recent featured blog posts. But now that I have more than 5 tagged as featured, I thought it would be good to have a dedicated page to display only featured blog posts. It is also available as a new filter at the top of the page listing all blog posts.

In the todo list

Some things I still have in my todolist and wish to work on but hadn’t found the time yet:

• Private area: As described before, I’m still thinking about having a hidden area with posts shared only with specific people. I even have a better idea in my head for a solution but hadn’t started it yet
• Improve accessibility: Something I haven’t work much on. I know this site works great with w3m, elinks or other terminal browser, but I also want to make sure it is usable by as many people as possible. If anyone has idea, tools or services that can help improve those, please let me know!
• Improve content stats: I want to add a few things like word counts or similar in the content stats pages. Or anything else that could be interesting. Haven’t thought too much about the details but I know that’s something that needs a bit more love :).

Conclusion

As always, it is fun to work on this site at my own pace. I try to not focus too much on editing the site and more on writing content, but sometime I have the energy to actually do both, so why not!