We are live!
The Workshop blog is finally up and running, in all its static glory. This makes the site practically complete, at least as complete as a website can ever be anyway. It also works great with my Multiblog plugin.
Feeds are live now
RSS- and Atom feeds are live now. You can subscribe to an entire blog using the links in the navigator or you can subscribe to a particular category in a blog. For that navigate to the category using either the navigator or by clicking the category button of an article.
Rewriting the Workshop
At this point I could start to make rewriting my website an annual tradition. There have been a number of little details that have been rubbing me the wrong way for almost a year now; the biggest one was the navigation bar on sub-sites like the Grid Framework product site. There were also accessibility issues relating to the lack of a proper HTML document outline and the use of JavaScript.
Goodbye macOS, hello GNU/Linux
I knew this day would come eventually, so here we are: I moved from macOS to GNU/Linux as my operating system. It has been a couple of months since then and I have settled in pretty comfortably; some things are better some things are worse, and some things are just plain different.
A new static site generator
Over two years already without rewriting the workshop? I have to rectify this, with the greatest rewrite yet! I have abandoned Pelican because I constantly had to adjust things manually after the build process, and even then there were parts of the website that weren’t working. This put me off from blogging, since after each post I would have to stitch everything back together by hand. Seeing that no static site generator would be able to meet my needs I decided to instead write my own in Scheme.
A pure HTML & CSS menubar
In the process of de-Bootstrapping the workshop I have to replace whole components provided by Bootstrap with my own constructs. The menu bar is one of the larger components I use, it’s fairly complex and requires a lot of non-semantic markup to get working. In this blog post I will describe step by step how I built mine, which requires less markup and does not rely on Javascript. You can try the demo to see what we are going for (please resize your window to see the responsiveness).
De-Bootsrapping the workshop, part 1
The first major step in phasing out the bloat that is Bootstrap from my website is done. None of the layout depends on any Bootstrap classes and markup. Instead, the layout is built from scratch using the new Flexbox and Grid features.
De-Bootsrapping the workshop, part 2
About a year ago I wrote about the first step in de-Bootstrapping my website, where I made my site layout independent of the Bootstrap CSS framework. I have now finally removed Bootstrap entirely from the website.
A page DSL for my website
I got bitten by the Lisp bug recently again, and so I decided to clean up an ugly wart in my static site generator which I use for generating the Workshop. The goal was to create an embedded domain-specific language (DSL) for defining web pages.
A web page template DSL for my website
In my previous blog post I presented how I had come up with an embedded domain-specific language for creating web pages in my custom static site generator. I also mentioned the concept of “templates” in passing. Of course it was only logical to follow the page DSL up with a custom template DSL to smooth over the code duplication and pattern repetition.