I’ll start with some good news today. I finished restructuring the main website HTML. It’s looking pretty good. On the surface the website of course looks the same, but if you look at the HTML underneath, it’s a lot simpler. I updated one of the core plugins, the one that builds lists of posts, which previously just put all posts into unnordered lists, to make the lists optional. I realised that there was no point in having lists for everything since really the only benefit is the layout they provide, and for most of the website I was removing that with CSS.
The only place on the website that uses unnordered lists is the linkblog. I like the look of links inside bullet pointed lists. But all the other parts of the site, the blog, podcast, newsletter and notes, don’t have lists. It’s just <article> tags inside <article> tags. Each day is an article, and each post within a day is an article. That works well because each article is dffectively a stand alone piece of content, so that matches up quite well with the intent of the <article> tag.
Along the way I had to totally disable code syntax highlighting. It was already not working for some reason. I don’t know why yet. I had turned off the prettifier for blog posts because it was removing the newlines on code blocks, but it meant the HTML was full of newlines and spaces, which made it very verbose and difficult to read. Now it’s all tidy, which is a nice feeling.
I hopefully will find some time in the future to find a way to have both syntax highlighting and pretty HTML. The RSS feeds are still for some unknown reason displaying weirdly in readers. There are a bunch of HTML escape characters that are being added somewhere causing the start of every post to look really strange. I’ve refactored all the code, added a bunch of debuggging and new helper functions that will make it easier to debug. Again though, that will need to be next month now.
There are a few small tidying tasks still to do, which I’ve coded up already, but will wait until my Github build minutes reset at the end of the month. I’ve got just about enough left to run the daily build to publish content to the website. The big question though is whether I’ll have enough food. This always seems to become an issue when there are problems with the RSS feeds for whatever reason. Consequently I really hate going anywhere near the RSS code. Starvation will do that to you. It goes without saying that no food, no blogging. Dispite what some people say, you just can’t run a vehicle on an empty tank.
And there have been signs there might be water issues over the next few days. They’ve stopped filling up the soap dispensor at the shop cafe, the women attendents at the public toilets have been groutchy recently, and there was another night of sleep depravation last night, followed by anger goading and another garbage war. I’ve got about 10 days until the next alergy flareup / cold. It would be nice to get some blogging done but it’s bext to impossible with all the angry young women tsunanis that happen almost everywhere I go now.
That’s the state of things. #