Some updates

I’ve been sick this weekend (not sick sick, just sniffeling and low on energy and beset with some minor aches), which led me to spend my entire Saturday on the couch. I woke up today feeling predictably restless but frustratingly not quite well enough to do anything substantial. I couldn’t bear to lose another 6 hours to Tears of the Kingdom (a review of which is likely still to come), yet I also don’t have the mental capacity to really bear down on my current game-in-progress (a post about which I hope is to come). I would have loved to bake some bread, but my heart’s set on focaccia and my starter isn’t quite ripe enough to start a levain, so that’ll have to wait for tomorrow.

I find that it’s very important to keep a list of chores well-suited for exactly days like this: the nonurgent, nontrivial, uninteresting not-nothings that I ought to get to when the time is right. I like having a pile of tasks ready for me when I don’t feel like solving any hard problems but don’t feel like going full smooth-brain, tasks which I can knock out with half a mind and be happier for having completed. I’ve got just such a list for this site, tracked using GitHub issues because why not, and so by the time you’re reading this post you may notice that some things have changed. Let’s talk about them!

The ones you might notice

• I’ve modified some of the site’s font choices for readability. Post bodies are now in a slightly larger, serifed version of IBM Plex, which hopefully makes larger blocks of text a bit less hypnotic to stare at. And the little tag boxes that accompany posts and post-previews should now be much more legible too, since I switched them from Space Mono to Space Grotesk (someday, I swear, I will find a practical use case for a monospaced font!).
• Keyboard navigation of post lists (e.g., home page or tag pages) now supports using the K and J keys for upwards and downwards movement. This is largely inspired by my recent adoption (and enjoyment!) of vim mode in most of my text editors, a paradigm shift so massive that I rebuilt my Ergodox layout to accommodate it. I may have more to say about how much I’ve enjoyed using vim soon.

The ones that are mostly just for me (here there be nerd shit)

• I reworked some of the backend logic for generating each page at /tags/*, so now the SvelteKit compiler can fully prerender my entire site at build time. It’s extremely unlikely that any visitors to the site will notice, but this means that every page you visit is actually a pre-existing, ready-to-serve HTML file instead of an HTML file generated ad-hoc in response to your browser’s request. In theory, this makes page serving a touch faster. In practice, it means the delivery of my site to your browser relies on less server-side magic, so it’ll be easier for me to change hosts, or even self-host, in the future.
• I added a README file to the repo where I host the code for this site. This is exclusively for my own benefit, but it’s a practice I want to document because I believe in it so whole-heartedly. READMEs at their best can save developers really meaningful time by concisely explaining how to read, run, and modify a piece of software. I love them, even (or especially) if the author is a past version of myself.