Website Redesign: Going Simpler
It’s been a while since I’ve shared any updates on what’s new around here. There’s a pretty good reason for that: not much is new.
But there are a few things.
TIL category love
For one, I decided to ditch a category template for TIL posts. I had been using a custom template part to distinguish between TIL and all other posts so that my category.php
file in WordPress would output a different layout for each. My initial strategy was to show full posts in the TIL category. They’re meant to be brief little posts and clicking through to a post single seemed unnecessary at first.
I’ve built up a number of TIL posts since then and I started to see how poor of an experience it is to scroll through a bunch of full posts. Plus, I wasn’t providing a path to the post single for any of them (again, I thought it’d be unnecessary) which is bad for a number of reasons, like SEO (at least that’s what I’m told). So farewell, custom category template! The TIL archive is now a clone of the general post archive.
Pagination
Other than a bunch of minor sale refinements, the next noticeable change is kinda embarrassing… my blog archive now has pagination. Yep, that’s right. I totally forgot to provide a way to navigate through the posts loop. ????♂️
Markdown in comments
I’d be remiss to not comment on comments. I decided to flip Jetpack on so I can use the feature that allows Markdown in comments. Seriously, that’s the only setting I’m using in the entire dang plugin out the dozens (hundreds?) in there.
![](https://i0.wp.com/geoffgraham.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/jetpack-markdown-comments.png?resize=1894%2C264&ssl=1)
Jetpack can be so gosh-dang useful for other things, so I may spend some time seeing if I can leverage anything else it offers. If I can’t find anything else, then I might search for a plugin that only adds Markdown support for comments so I have less admin bloat.
Webmentions
I’m totally down with the IndieWeb thing. While I can’t fully wrap my head around the IndieWeb community as a whole, I love the idea of owning my own content, whether that’s blog posts, saved links, social media posts, images, videos, or whatever. I’ve long been weary of third-party platforms treating me as the product rather than the customer, so I’ve largely rid myself of things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like.
Webmentions are a piece of the IndieWeb puzzle. The idea is that my site can consume any activity related to my content (say a like on Twitter, or a blog post that’s written in response to one of my posts) and display it on the post. That’s a nice way to stay engaged with social media without having to be on social media.
I’ve still got a way to go here to get it working the way I think it needs to. The IndieWeb community has a number of WordPress plugins that I’ve installed to get that going. We’ll see how it goes.
What’s next?
I dunno. I’m starting to get bored with some of my aesthetics. For example, I’ve been using Times New Roman for headings simply because it’s performant. I might trade it in for something nicer and take the performance hit.
I also have a love-hate relationship with the brown color palette. At least I used CSS custom properties to define my colors, so it would be relatively easy to swap things out if I decide to.
Other than that, it’s just another day in the neighborhood. This site has become a sort of worry stone for me while we’re living in these uncertain pandemic times.
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