Weekend Update

It may not be obvious, but I’ve actually done a lot of work and made a lot of progress on the site over the weekend.

First, there’s actually some new content. Original Wadny band member Dick Hull provided the story behind the name―which used to be hosted on his website, but went offline when he switched ISP a while ago―as well as a few additional pictures. I also brought my blogroll and the colophon up to date, although I should do a deeper dive on how the site is built and deployed.

Second, I made a few more tweaks to the layout and design. This was mostly detail work to a few pictures, but the most visible change was making the seasonal header/navigation theme change happen automatically in JavaScript. It will need a little more work in the future because I don’t have pictures and colors picked out for summer and fall, but we’re a while away from that at the moment.

Finally, I went back over basically all of the content pages on the site, including all the old news posts, and converted most of the source material from HTML to Markdown (technically Kramdown, which is the Markdown variant used by Jekyll, which is the tool that powers this site). That may have been a little overkill, but it made it easier to read and maintain the code behind the site, gave me a chance to proofread and correct some typos and bugs, and provided a few improvements. For an example, the old post on comment sanitization now has syntax highlighting in the code samples. More importantly, all the links to different parts of this site now use link tags in Jekyll which get validated when the site builds, so I can ensure I don’t break links going forward.

Some of this was pretty tedious, but hopefully most of the tinkering is done now, and I can feel comfortable using the site as an outlet for ideas again when they strike me instead of feeling like I have to fix the site first.