Blog/site update

summary of last few years of site changes.

I now host this site on Github, since it is free and fairly easy for me to use. I push the new version of the site with a simple git push. I only pay for my domain name.

I am still using the same blog builder Python script I wrote years ago, but I've refactored it a dozen times. I also use a similar script to rebuild static pages from markdown source too.

Other changes:

• Colors are either default or white-on-black for dark mode. Information that I used to de-emphasize with grey-on-white text is now put in a box.

• Switch from original-flavor Markdown to CommonMark. Allows me to put markdown inside a <div>. For example:

  <div id="foobar" style="display:none;">
  
  > Foo
  > Bar
  
  </div>
  <button onclick="document.getElementById('foobar')
                           .style
                           .display = 'block';">
  SHOW
  </button>
  

• Reduce extra resources needed by a page:

  • The <link rel="icon"> is now a data: URL.
  • I inline all CSS.
  • I also inline a SVG version of my written name on the static pages as a banner. Effort was made to minimize the size. By vectorizing what was originally a scanned image, it is much smaller and looks really good on high-dpi screens.

• Starting to try to meet accessibility standards.

• Replace <a href="" onlick="...."> with <button>, since that is less of an abuse of html. It is more clear to the user that clicking that will change something on the page, not go to a new page.

• Remove extraneous content from main page.