Narration for Posts, for You!

If you’ve clicked on this post itself, you’ll notice there’s a sound file at the top. That’s because if you click it, or hit the P key, you’ll hear… me, reading this! I’m working on adding this to old posts one by one, so you might see that popping up eventually. But, partially for accessibility, and partially just to make these sort of ramblings easier to take in while only half paying attention or just doing something else entirely, I’m putting audio narration on every post here that I can.

Doing What Markdown Can't: Specifying Image Width and Height

By default, the Markdown renderer in Hugo, at this point in time, is Goldmark, a CommonMark compliant renderer. CommonMark makes no provisions for manually specifying the width or height of an image. There’s various extensions, like those for Pandoc, Kramdown, and GFM, but Goldmark doesn’t support those. Google is getting a little cranky with the amount of CLS on some pages, especially on mobile, so it’s a good idea for me to start specifying sizes for most images. How should I do this? By hacking it on as a feature that is in no way the intended use for anything involved.

Detailed Images, With No Shortcodes

If you remember when I first added the Medium Zoom library, I wasn’t using one of its features: the ability to load a larger image when the user clicks to zoom in, only when the user wants to zoom in. However, I added this later, and in that, the method I used was to use a Hugo shortcode to include the image with proper attributes in the <img> tag. Well as it turns out, I don’t need to do this. Now, I can have that happen automatically with standard Markdown ![image links]().

New Feature: Post Labels

Now you might not see this too much since I plan to use the feature sparingly, categories and tags are both capable of sorting everything to a satisfactory level, but I’m using this thing that I just made to add extra little labels, which have a few cool uses.

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.

The Move to WebP

Anyone notice that pages are (hopefully) loading a little quicker, especially for ones that contain a bunch of images?

Well I just changed from using PNG image files, to WebP image files. For some more specifics, read on.