To Do

This website doesn't use a blogging engine, but it does use a static site generator. I originally thought that using one of these tools would feel constraining, as that's the impressive I got when I first tried to use one. So, I originally built this site in Svelte, trying to make it "from scratch".

In retrospect, this choice gave me too much freedom. I find I am able to be more creative with this sites design within the confines of a static site generator. At the end of the day, my website is static, with minimal interactivity. There isn't anything it needs to do that can't be accomplished with HTML, CSS, and a very light helping of JavaScript.

This website is still largely made "by hand". There is a straightforward build process. This means I'm missing a few helpful utilities, like bundlers, but the trade-off is worth it. I still find that most of my time is spent thinking about CSS, either way.

This simplicity does mean that there are many features missing from this website which might be common on other blogs. It might be nice to add more functionality and polish in the future. To that end, I keep a list of ideas here that I can come back to and reference when I want to do some work on this site.

Many of these ideas are inspired by these post:

• Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites
• Ideas for Your Personal Website
• 100 things you can do on your personal website

Implement me:

• Add the ability to leave comments on posts (maybe)
• Better internal structure / linking
• The ability to tag blog posts, and to search / filter by tag
• An RSS feed (is this too cargo-cult?)
• Page-reading progress indicator
• Some way to reliably style external links to indicate that they are external
• More dynamic content, for example, some way to preview blog posts from sites I trust and like
• A "Last-modified-on" indicator for all pages
• Better post-excerpt social sharing formatting (now this is cargo-culting)
• Click-to-enlarge / preview-in-place images that are embedded in posts
• Make a /now page
• Make an /ideas page
• Make a /uses or /tools page
• Create a sitemap
• Create a blogroll
• Improve 404 page
• Add a gallery for my pixel art
• Improve layouts for better responsiveness to different screen sizes
• Understand robots.txt and related concepts - actually do something with it
• Add more Easter eggs
• Maintain a reading list
• Maintain a personal dictionary
• Add a sparkline
• Use weird characters ⁂ more liberally
• Add hovercards
• Audit to ensure that no unintended cookies are being used / libraries being imported
• Add a privacy statement