Recent changes

As I said previously, this site is just a casual, fun thing I’m maintaining, mostly a repository for my thoughts and notes. That’s why the Digital Garden/ Zettelkassen / Personal wiki part gets all the attention.

With that said, today I finally sat down to improve this a bit.

Here’s what I finally did today:

Figured out how to run the site locally. My iteration speed and testing/debugging workflow improved immensely due to much shorter delay. Obviously. It was easy, and it’s now documented under ‘useful bash commands’. I just hadn’t really prioritized it that much, since remote testing worked anyway and the site almost never broke.
Improved the styling a bit. There’s a ton of room for improvement, I am no front-end developer or designer, but at least now the font-size isn’t huge and the general style is alright.
My favorite change: added search functionality for my Digital Garden. This will come in handy when there are a lot more notes in here. I’m thinking of doing a prettier layout than “all the filenames in a huge table”, something like the beautiful garden in Maggie Appleton’s website

My next things to do are:

Keep adding notes and zettels to my Garden.
Add a “thought trains” note where I just write whatever comes to my mind, with a low bar for quality.
Improve the site’s design.

Anyway, this really feels like gardening in a way: it’s relaxing, things grow organically and slowly as needs arise (aesthetic or otherwise).

I don’t think many people will ever read this, so it’s almost like a journal.

Maybe I’ll start using this post as a changelog.

2022-08-16: Move all wiki-articles to wiki. Remove category pages for the time being, but they will be re-added soon.

2022-08-24: After adding the second Personal Wiki post, I removed fontawesome and replaced it with beautiful icon images. I was using few icons and now most pages have seen a ~50% reduction in size.

2022-08-30: Make headers Georgia, blog posts have description and visible date and are inline blocks now, also lots of little changes to navigation guide and wiki main page yesterday. Also made bottom buttons lazy-loading, I wonder if someone will notice. The next day, make wiki items similar to blog items and height=auto everywhere on mobile.

2022-09-06: Unified search through tagged and search page, added default and custom images for general social media. Reduced line-height for H1 to hopefully decrease bounce ratio for mobile.

2022-09-08: The big site redesign. Made site monochromatic, and layout header single line and flex. The menu became responsive and cuter on mobile. In 09/15 I also added the little ‘#’ after headers on hover using CSS.

2022-09-25: After the big redesign, traffic fell a bit. Now made images bigger by default and responsive in size. Also added bottom buttons and added links to homepage.

2022-10-03: Implement grid layouts. Simplify post descriptions.

2022-10-26: Center top nav, simplify its design, improve palette slightly (by keeping hue, only changing black and white), add bottom margin to p. Next day, added night mode and all the redirects Google wanted. Increase font-size. So far seeing a small reduction in bounce rate and a significant increase in session duration, let’s see if it keeps improving.

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19 Nov 2020 - importance: 1