You Might Fill With Laughter Until You Break

Over the past five years, at various points this blog has had some form of “on this day” feature, displaying blog posts from whatever the current calendar day happens to be but in prior years, if any posts happened to have been posted on that day.

It’s among the things I’ve wanted to restore under this Eleventy incarnation of the site, and thanks to using code by Sacha Chua as a starting point, I’ve finally got this up and running on the main page, which also has been redesigned to accommodate this as well as both the return of my “linklog”, or list of recently read blog posts which is powered by the RSS feed of an Instapaper tag, and a list of places where you can find more blogs, which is powered by me coding HTML by hand.

In theory, and it’s been working for me at any rate, the “on this day” section should be bordered by the relevant color for that day. For the purposes of this widget, it’s using the day it can retrieve from your browser, so it’s a “live” look at posts from previous years on the calendar day the reader is in.

With these changes, the front page to the blog now consists of the site-wide sidebar and five sections: the five most recent posts, with excerpts; the next five most recent posts, without excerpts; posts “on this day” in prior years, without excerpts; links to the ten blog posts by other people I’ve most recently read; and a list of places to find more blogs.

(What I’ve for years called a “linklog” or a “bloglog” is somewhat similar to what others call a “postroll”—a rolling list of posts rather than a rolling list of blogs, which is the blogroll—except that mine is automated and just goes in reverse chronological order. I’m not manually curating it in any way whatsoever as many people do with postrolls.)

This, in theory, should just about do it in terms of tinkering with the blog setup, as these were the outstanding issues, along with search which was addressed last month. The exception is that if Instapaper ever figures out why the RSS feeds for tags don’t work unless you’re logged in, while the RSS feed for your full archive works just fine, the “linklog” will change to recently read blog posts (“bloglog”) rather than more general links.

Unlike the “on this day” feature which runs live from a JSON of posts, the “linklog” feature only updates when I happen to do a rebuild the site. If for some reason you want to made sure you see everything I’m reading, you can subscribe to the Instapaper RSS in the header.

Speaking of search, as noted in an addendum I tacked on yesterday, I’m no longer using Pagefind which in the end is just way more solution than I need. I just need simple matching searches, and now it’s running via a script that sort of under the hood loads a JSON file of all my posts into your browser and queries that directly.

Also, I tweaked the social image that appears when you share anything on the blog, so that the fonts now match the fonts the site itself currently is using, because the difference was poking my OCD in the eye.

The final change is that I expanded the bio in the sidebar (or header if you’re on a portrait-mode tablet or a phone). This mostly had to do with the sidebar feeling skimpy compared to the rest of the layout and I wanted to buy it up a bit. Although it’s also simply true that life these days includes “climate crisis, rising fascism, increasing disability, eventual poverty, and inevitable death”.