So, what's new around here?

Between my regular day-to-day routine and obligations, and writing a post a day for the last few weeks, I haven’t had much time to tinker with the website. But I did manage to make some minor stylistic and content updates.

Live now

New pages

I now have two pages dedicated to the IndieWeb and the Web Writers’ Collective. These communities are important to me and I thought they deserved a permanent place within the structure of the website. I intend to update these pages with resources and other relevant information in due course.

Footer update

If you scroll down to the bottom of this post you will see there is a new section in the footer that includes a marquee text (a line of text that scrolls in an infinite loop from one edge of the screen to the other—from right to left in my case). The HTML <marquee> tag is now deprecated and its use is discouraged. For my text, I have used CSS animations instead. Here is the code for anyone interested.

HTML:

  
  <div class="marquee-container">
    <span class="marquee-text">Join the IndieWeb</span>
  </div>

CSS:

  .marquee-container {
      width: 100vw;
      position: relative;
      left: 50%;
      right: 50%;
      margin-left: -50vw;
      margin-right: -50vw;
      overflow: hidden;
      white-space: nowrap;
      background: var(--accent);
      padding: 0.5rem 0;
  }

  .marquee-text {
      display: inline-block;
      width: auto;
      color: white;
      font-size: 0.75rem;
      font-family: "Cascadia Mono", monospace;
      animation: marquee-scroll 20s linear infinite normal;
  }

  .marquee-text:hover {
    animation-play-state: paused;
  }

  @media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {
    .marquee-text {
        animation: none !important;
    }
  }

  @keyframes marquee-scroll {
      0%   { transform: translateX(100vw); }
      100% { transform: translateX(-100%); }
  }

The credit for this code belongs to the GetZenQuery website, where I copied and adapted it from. This text links to my newly-created IndieWeb page.

Plans, plans and more plans

The list of things I want to do with the website keeps getting longer and longer. These are on the top:

Webmentions

Just above the marquee text in the footer, you would have noticed a Webmention button. My site doesn’t support webmentions yet, and the button technically does not belong there. If you’ve seen my colophon, you would know that it says “All posts support Webmentions”. What’s with all the lies?

I added the button because it blends nicely with the IndieWeb and microformats buttons. The line in the colophon is a remnant of the migration from WordPress. On WordPress, implementing webmentions was easy—I just had to install a plugin. On a static site like the current one, it takes more work. And although tools like webmention.io exist, implementation requires a general understanding of the underlying technology and the literacy to read through API documents. So I’m taking it very slow.

I’m not lying about Webmentions, just chronologically challenged. (And lazy).

Sitemap

On the WordPress version of the site, I had a human-readable sitemap, automatically generated using a query loop. I haven’t figured out how to do anything quite like that on my Astro site yet.

Search

A search function would be nice, but from what I’ve seen, implementing one seems quite daunting. I’m not making any promises.

Stats

I want to add a stats section to my blog. Out of all the nice-to-have features mentioned here, this seems like the easiest one to implement. It does require some JS knowledge that I don’t have, but at the same time it looks straightforward enough if I simply had the patience to read through/sit through some tutorials.

That concludes my Webmasters Update. Stick around to find out what gets built, will you?