Site Update 3: Things Are Bigger

There have actually been very few changes to the site layout since the last post, which is a problem. However, I wanted to briefly put into writing the things floating though my head over the past month or so regarding what should happen to the site.

Formatting Changes

I think the only thing that really changed was the body text font size. This was motivated by a suggestion from a friend that I should aim to have fewer words per line as that would make things easier to read. Beyond that, unimplemented things are still unimplemented, and there is still a lot of work that needs to be done, whenever I feel up for it.

Site Vision

Following the initial formatting completion of the main page, I was feeling excited to post a lot about the various different things I was doing. However, that excitement died down as I remembered the constraint I had placed on myself to keep the site lean and emphasize performance. In general, I like offering images both to help convey ideas and to break up the wall of text that my posts would otherwise become. However, images in websites are stupidly hard to optimize, as I have learned. What I really should do is implement lazy-loading (which would leave me to abandon my Javascript-less site requirement) as well as take advantage of mobile images (which would require automated generation of mobile resolution images and writing out image tags rather than using Markdown syntax).

Both of these ideas did not appeal to me, so naturally I just sulked instead. This may seem like a joke, but I very seriously considered doing another site redesign around the minimal content I was going to put out. However, I have decided to just suck it up and post fewer images. Also, I probably just won’t post much in general. Perhaps I will adopt a quarterly update model for each of the categories, to explain what I’ve seen and done in each of the categories over the past three months. But I will keep working on the site, because I actually like how it looks and it will give me something nice to show other people if they are interested.