Adding proper TOCs to my posts (AKA theme update)

Adding Detailed Zoom Images

Remember the time I added Medium Zoom? Well as it turns out, as I was reading through Zoom’s documentation, that you can specify a separate URL to load when the image zooms in. I like this, because I crop all my images to be (for landscape oriented) 1000 pixels wide, just slightly over the size of the content area that they go into. This is a serious reduction in size from the resolution they’re taken at. I do this just to improve load times, even with WebP and compression, extra pixels (that get resized to nothingness) are extra data that needs to be sent. And since it’s literally too big to be shown like that, I crop them so that pages load nearly instantly. The problem is that when you click on an image to see it, you get… basically nothing. I (because reasons) don’t have any old images so they’ll stay the same. But from now on, any images that are added in will have a detailed version that loads when you click to zoom.

Teknikaldomain.me Website Architecture Overview

So I just checked in with initialcommit.com, the website run by Jacob Stopak, the same person I collaborated with to help explain the internals of version control systems, not once, but twice even. And he published an overview of how he made the site, and what tools he used. As I was looking, I noticed, we took a very different approach to get to two similar endpoints.

If you just want to see what I did, read on. If you want to see the differences, or are just curious about the various ways that sites can be built, read his first, then come back with that knowledge in mind.

Magnify and (Do Not Enhance) - Medium Zoom

So for a while now, any images that are put in the content text of a blog post have been links, you can click on one to be taken straight to the image file itself. Well if you haven’t noticed yet, that has just changed, and, in my opinion, a way that’s for the better. Meet Medium Zoom.

Spin the Whee- I Mean, the Subtitle Randomizer!

So if you haven’t noticed, every time you view that main title bar, the subtitle has a little extra tagline on the end of it… sometimes, sometimes it doesn’t. Well, that randomizes on every request. And here, we talk about the smallest thing I’ve made, to date: the tagline picker for that.

I'm Ashamed, Disqus

So if you’ve ever tried to leave a comment, on here or any other site that uses Disqus (“Discuss”) for commenting, you’ll notice that it has a little array of formatting buttons below the comment box that allow you to.. format your comment. Make things bold, underlined, or insert links. Cool, right? Yes, but if you look closely, you’ll notice that they’re inserting the appropriate HTML tag for whatever you just clicked. Which makes me wonder… how does Disqus deal with other HTML tags?

Full Text RSS Feeds

After reading on Kev Quirk’s blog post about including the full text of a post instead of just an excerpt, I’ve decided to do that here. And I’ll outline the before, after, and (naturally) all the steps in-between that caused much headache (and late-night coffee consumption).

Adding Google Charts Integration

Yesterday I posted about Cloudflare’s cache, and if you didn’t notice (or read far enough down), there’s actual pie charts with data in them for visualization.

Yeah, so now I can add the Google Charts API and draw charts on any page that I like, and the best part is that it was surprisingly simple to do that.

Configuring Cloudflare's Cache, and Cache-Control Headers

I’ve talked enough about Cloudflare caching that I’m not going to do introduce it again. This time though, we’re going in depth just a bit more, going over what’s cached, default cache times, and… more headers.

Complying With the Latest Security Policies

Modern websites and modern browsers support a wide range of security features to communicate specifically what is and is not allowed to be loaded, executed, or sent over the network. Being the person that I am, I’m going to comply with the latest guidelines and best practices as much as I can… and it’s a headache.