Mandaris

I had made a declaration about restarting theme development and I’m pretty happy to have finished it before my self imposed deadline. This is post is mostly about why I changed things versus how I changed them.

Changes to workflow

I spent some time experimenting with git and codeberg to see how I could integrate it with Micro.blog, but wasn’t successful. But, as James mentioned no work is wasted and I was able to take the research about multiple remotes.

git remote add lab-play https://github.com/mandaris/lab-play.git

Looking back, I probably should have made a different name and started the repository as empty versus having GitHub place some defaults that I had to --force to be overwritten.

This allows me to branch, merge, and test on my test instance without worrying that I’ll mess up publish to the main site.

There was a significant amount of trial and error related to having to merge main into the two remotes, but it was mostly me having to learn the new tools.

Performance Tuning?

I removed the link to the tabler css file that would allow me to more easily use the font in my writing. I’ve decided that I’ll go through and just add the ones I specifically want for the interface. I feel that some people will probably use an rss reader and won’t be able to see the fonts anyway.

In addition, I used the font-display attribute for my font definition.

@font-face {
  font-family: "Atkinson";
  src: url("/fonts/AtkinsonHyperlegibleNext-Regular.woff2") format('woff2');
  src: url("/fonts/AtkinsonHyperlegibleNext-Regular.woff2") format('truetype');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
  font-display: fallback;
}

I choose fallback despite the recommendations to use swap or optional because I want the user to continue to read without the blip of the page being repainted to adjust for the new font.

I did not minimize the css or remove any classes other than accent-color. The place I was referencing it was marked as not having enough contrast. I’ll have to rethink this as it was there for decrotive purposes.

This is a good time to say that just because something is marked as an issue, it could be a false positive or a way to make something better. In this case, it’s better by not being there.

Where am I?

The moving of the About me section was the easiest part. I removed the media query section in css that would place the section to the side on larger screens. I then made the width larger of the initial 1 column layout.

grid-template-columns: minmax(300px, 75ch);

I choose 75ch because my research had stated that between 70 to 80 characters was the ideal line limit for reading. If you see something different let me know.

What about the transition?

I’m still working on that. Part of me wants to throw my hands in the air state that it’s just bugginess from it being a new thing, but I think it might be because the URLs on the server end with .html and my local instance has /.

I’ll continue working on this throughout the month.

Various other tweets

I made the h1 smaller in order to reduce focus on it. I really want people to come into the site and just start reading the content. That’s part of the reason I moved the About me section.

I also removed some of the links at the top of the page. I’ve been debating a hamburger menu, but have decided against it because I don’t want navigational items to be hidden from the user.

Pretty much the opposite of Liquid Glass.