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Pat Dryburgh

Apr 10, 2020 2 min read

A few small updates

I’ve pushed a few minor updates to my site this week.

  1. I played around with the inertia of the scrolling animation on the homepage to behave better on larger screens.
  2. I’ve worked out how to group posts by day and to sort posts within a day from oldest-to-newest (while days continue to be presented newest-to-oldest). The intention with this change is to make reading through a day’s posts feel more natural, as often on days when I do publish more than one post, they are often connected in some way. If there’s interest, I might write up a post about how I accomplished this.
  3. I’ve refined how I’m handling dark mode on the site. Instead of creating separate style sheets for each theme and swapping out the link rel="stylesheet" tag for each theme, I’m now using CSS Variables and setting a data-theme attribute on the HTML element. Switching between themes now feels instantaneous.
  4. I’ve removed the lazy loading for images. While lazy loading makes for faster loading speeds, it also means that people who don’t have JavaScript enabled can’t see any images. I decided the minor cost of speed is worth the improvement to accessibility.
  5. Less important to you than me, I cut the time it takes for this site to build by more than 50%. I did this by removing some unused code and reducing the number of include tags in the default.html template that is used to generate every single page of this site. What once took anywhere from 20–30 seconds to build is now taking 8–9 seconds which makes iterating and publishing new changes so much more enjoyable.

On an unrelated note, this post and the post from earlier today were both scheduled using Alex Johnson’s excellent Heroku Scheduler job for scheduling Jekyll posts. Unfortunately, I’m still using my multi-app setup for publishing posts from my phone though I do intend to dig into IndieKit by Paul Robert Loyd which I was introduced to by Boris as a way of setting up a Micropub endpoint on Heroku. Still have to work my way through some configuration before that’s ready to go.

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