I'm back!

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Wow, it's been awhile! My role at work changed, so I haven't been able to update the site at all. In fact, I had messed up the DNS records, so it wasn't even up for awhile! I use Google Workspace for email, Blogger (where this is actually being typed up and posted) and a few other things, but Github and Netlify to host and present the site. When I switched my DNS over to Netlify, I left my MX records at Google, so I wasn't getting new emails. I was expecting an email at keith@mclamb.org for a work project, but it wasn't coming through, so I fumbled around and eventually just swapped everything back over to Google. Since I don't have my site hosted at Google, it didn't have anything to display. My poor site was down for quite awhile and I was too busy to even realize it. I've got everything corrected now, though! Now you can read this on my site, then send me an email about how poorly it was written!

I expect that I won't have much downtime with the new role, so I'll probably start working on this in my off time. I like the idea of having something that I made from scratch being out in the universe for the world to see, even if it's just a handful of people here and there. I also want to continue learning HTML/CSS/Javascript and the best way to learn is to do.

Things I still need to do now that the site is actually back up:

• I need to go through and relearn For loops in Javascript so I can change the ForEach loop that pulls my blog posts in the main page to a For loop that stops at 5 items. That shouldn't be too difficult. I just need to play around a bit to make sure I have it right.
• I still need to nix the Contact Me page and redo the nav bar.
• I'm thinking about changing the color scheme to something lighter. Maybe I'll set up a light/dark mode. That's pretty low on the list of priorities, though.

Finally, progress!

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Progress! Well, not yet, but it's coming! I haven't update this blog in a bit, but I've still been working on the site itself in the meantime. I don't really like that, at the time this is being written, the main page is just a long list of every post I've made, so I'm making an archive page and a sidebar with links to older posts. I hate that my "Contact Me" page looks like it was ripped right out of a 1994 Geocities website, so I'm moving that to the sidebar too. The sidebar takes up too much space if the site is viewed from a mobile phone, I've made it to where the sidebar isn't there if the screen is too narrow for it to display well. If you, dear reader, want to see what it looks like once it's live, just turn your phone sideways and you should see it. I haven't deployed it yet, but it shouldn't be much longer.

I haven't been able to put much time into the site recently. Work has been hectic. I've had three of the last 34 days off and I don't have another scheduled day off until the 23rd. I've signed up for every second of overtime I can get and will continue to do so for as long as they'll let me. With how busy things have been recently, it seems like they'll keep letting me.

Things I still need to do for the site (that I can think of):

• I need to work on the CSS for the archive page. I finally got the JavaScript and HTML working, now I just need to make it less ugly.
• I still need to change up the JavaScript on the main page to limit the number of posts. Without that, what's the point of an archive page? Right now, it loops through every post given by the Blogger API and spits out the title, date, content, etc. I just need to change that loop to stop after the most recent five or so. I have an idea of how to accomplish that, but putting it into place should be a fun learning experience.
• I should probably 86 the Contact Me page all together, then clean up my top navigation bar. Maybe I'll go ahead and redo the entire top nav bar.

Small wins are still wins!

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Sometimes you have to celebrate the small wins too, ya know. For instance, your friend and humble narrator just managed to get a perfect score on Lighthouse, a Chrome Developer tool that measures a few things (like speed, accessibility, etc) about your website.

Things I'm working on now

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Okay, so I know that I complained about how much accessibility added to my HTML in my last post, but it's my current ADHD fueled hyper-fixation. A few things that I'm working on:

• Character spacing
  • Increasing the space between characters makes everything easier to read for folks with dyslexia. I don't think I'm going to space things out quite as far as is suggested by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines because that much spacing makes it more difficult for me to read it. I'm trying to find a place somewhere in the middle.
• Line height
  • Adding a little more space between each line also makes content easier to read for our dyslexic friends. After this update is made, I should be up to spec.
• Contrast
  • I didn't actually have to do anything to the color scheme. Everything was already okay there!
• Headings
  • I had a heading style for stylistic purposes not realizing that was bad form.

And just like that, the hyper-fixation has passed. The changes listed above aren't live as of the time of this posting, but should be shortly.

SEO and A11y

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One of the few things about this page that I've actually taken pride in was the minimal amounts of HTML that was used to throw it together. Search Engine Optimization and Accessibility threw that out the window. 51 out of 69 lines of the source code for the page that you're reading this on is all SEO, A11y and Google Analytics. Why does Apple need 9 different icons to be able to show my pretty face in the tab/bookmark/whatever?

But, hey, good news: Now, when you share a link to this page on social media, the person getting the link gets to see a snapshot of your gorgeous, humble narrator and a hastily and poorly written summary of the page!

Let's go back to the length of HTML. This page has, like, almost none. I think it's pretty nifty. Here's the actual source code for it as of the time of this blog:

<div class="navBar"> 
  <header class="tracking-in-expand">mclamb.org</header>  
  <a href="contact.html">Contact Me</a> 
  <a href="resume.html">Resume</a>  
  <a href="index.html">Home</a> 
</div>

<div id="blog"></div>

That's it! The name of my site with a class tag, a few links and an empty <div>! Everything else is done in CSS or JavaScript. JavaScript uses Google's Blogger API to get all of the data about my blog (e.g. title, ID, author, date published, etc.), then takes the information that I want to share here, wraps some HTML tags around it, then inserts it into that <div>. CSS tidies everything up and makes it look nice and pretty. All in all, this has been a fun, only occasionally stressful, usage of my downtime.