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.

Updates not worth mentioning being mentioned anyway

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Minor site tweaks that I think almost add up to something: I added a gradient to the bar at the top of the screen, then rounded the corner to it and the links on the right side of the screen. I also added a "logo" to the top bar using a Google Web Font. That was my first time using a web font! That was so far from being a thing twenty-some-odd years ago when I last made an attempt at web development. You damn kids with your newfangled web fonts! Get off my lawn!

I also managed to get Google Analytics working so, in theory, I'll be able to see what type of device is being used to view this and the general location of the viewer. That is, provided that I get a viewer. To my knowledge, the only people that have seen any of this have been forced by yours truly. Thankfully, all parties have been kind enough to feign interest.

Maybe I'll look into Search Engine Optimization. I'm not sure who I'd want to find this site or for what reason, but that seems like an important skill to possess. I might also try out some CSS animations for the blog titles. Nothing too gaudy, just a slight fade in or something. One day, I'll think of a way to make the contact me page look halfway decent. I should also come up with more content than just a resume and a rambling blog that's about itself.

Whoa! You're seeing this on my website!

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My blog is live! I may have been a little too overenthusiastic during my last post. As it turns out, I hadn't quite cracked the code (low quality pun intended) on the Blogger API just yet. I could get it to work in CodePen, the site I use to work on this during my free time at work, but couldn't get it to work once it was deployed. I ended up rewriting it to avoid pulling the Google API JavaScript module and now it works just fine!

Now I need to work on making this place a little prettier. I like the backgrounds I put on this blog section, especially how they run into the graphic on the side of the screen, but everything looks a little... I don't know. Empty? Unfinished? Unpolished for sure. I'm trying to cut myself some slack, since I only started learning how to do all of this a few weeks ago, but I hate making something that isn't perfect.

I need ideas. Maybe I should include the comment section in these blog posts so that the, like, one person that reads this can give me suggestions. I did make something using the PoetryDB API to display a random three line poem. Maybe I'll stuff that into a footer or something. It can be seen here if anyone is interested.

I did it!

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Your friend and humble narrator finally figured out how to use the Blogger API to import stuff over to an HTML file on his site and, in the process, wrote his first successful forEach loop! Now, I won't sit here and tell you that I'm a genius or anything. I will strongly imply it, though.

I'm only mildly ashamed to admit that I went crawling to Will, the gentleman from my first post, for help after banging my head on the problem for a few days. Imagine my relief when he struggled with it himself. Now that I've managed to get it working before him, my success feels even more triumphant! WHO'S THE BRILLIANT JAVASCRIPT DEVELOPER NOW, WILLIAM!? Okay, fine, still not me, but I'm still chalking this up as a win in the ol' Keith column!

This is harder than I thought!

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Figuring out how to use REST APIs is harder than I thought. I wanted to keep a blog to have a record of how this process was going, but I didn't want to use VS Code for every post and I wanted to get a better understanding of API integration. Keeping a blog at Blogger.com and using their API to keep my website's main page updated with my most recent posts seemed like a no brainer. The only problem is that it has helped me to realize that I myself am a no brainer. Haha

I understand JavaScript objects and I'm familiar with JSON but, as of the time of this writing, can't for the life of me figure out how to get the JSON from the API usable further down in my script so that I can send it to the HTML page. The furthest I've gotten so far was being able to see the object in a console.log, so I know my GET or FETCH calls are working.

I'll get there eventually. This is mostly just me documenting my roadblocks on the off chance that someone else in a similar situation sees that they aren't alone. It will also be nice to be able to look back at this later on when I have a better understanding and see my personal progress and growth.

My First Blog Post!

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Hi! Welcome to my first attempt at putting together a website in over two decades! I suppose that I’ll use this blog to kind of catalog my experience putting this together for now, then, when I’m satisfied with how everything has come together, it will either go untouched or will turn into whatever I think is interesting at the time.

This all started because of a coworker, Will. Will put together a tool for work using JavaScript, Google App Scripts and Google Sheets . It wasn’t super fancy, but it was cooler than anything I could have made. Now, I like Will, he’s a good guy, but I can’t have him walking around possessing more skills than me, so I set off to learn JavaScript. A handful of courses on LinkedIn Learning later, I decided to brush up on my HTML and CSS skills too. My brain is a use it or lose it memory hole, so I knew that I’d need to apply my newly learned skills if I wanted to make my efforts to learn them worth the time invested.