Plans for DistinctiveStatic
So, first blog. Momentous occasion. I figured I'd use it to document the next few steps I want to take for this site.
- Essay Section: I've written essays for zines and the occasional newsletter before, and I'd like to coallate them into one section. Basically a spot for things that were originally published elsewhere. Future 'essays' will probably just be blog posts, unless I publish them in something else first.
- Upgrade to Eleventy: At this point, I've got enough CSS and HTML under my belt that I think it would be smart to upgrade to Eleventy as a management program. Without the upgrade I'm going to have to manually change the links for every blog post, and that gets old fast.
This would also allow me to add tags to blog posts. Which would be excellent. That would allow for a much less stressful organizing experience. - Accessibility: I'm working really hard to try to keep things accessible on this site as it is, but a few things definitely need upgrades. I know apparently my font color for the body isn't at high enough contrast (though the ones that are at high enough contrast hurt my eyes, so I'm struggling to find a compromise).
Once the upgrade to Eleventy is complete I'm going to look into paying someone to accessibility-screen the site with a screen-reader as well, since I have no real practical understanding of how those are used in the day-to-day. Theoretical understanding is only so helpful with accessibility. - Sizing: In my struggle to understand CSS relative sizing, I impulsively set the REM for the site at a fun 100vw. It meant I could just use decimals when trying to figure out what the fuck size something needed to be.
However, this is unsustainable as a practice: I'm concerned someone's computer won't be able to load the CSS for something, and BOOM, suddenly my entire site is unreadable. Not great. The main downside to this is most REM are based in pixels, which I don't like because they're not inherently relative to the viewport. I'm going to have to do a little more research on this. - Maintenance: I'm just constantly trying to upgrade code from what I started with. My first real coding project (as in, took it as a learning tool but also wanted to publish it) was AbsolutelyFeral, which, while fun, is also A) inaccessable as fuck, B) messy as hell on the backend, and C) so old-school in the funnest of ways, but not practical for a site I want people to come back to interact with.
This is meant to be something a little more permanent, a little more actual blog and less playground. But I started with the same level of skill as AbsolutelyFeral, which meant a lot of learning was done while I made it. So some parts are absolutely not up to par; my CSS could use some massive simplification, for one.
The hope is that this will be a back-end-only thing, something I can test on my end before it ever goes live, but I've already seen the site do some whacky shit when it gets on a phone I don't own, so we'll see. - Easter Eggs: Lastly, this. One of my favourite parts of the old web was finding easter eggs on sites, and I miss that. So I'll be trying my hand at some CSS, some silly things, and seeing what I manage to do without ruining accessibility or structure.