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Bikeshedding Must Fall—My (Possibly Ill-fated) Attempt To Stop Overthinking This Site And To Focus on More Important Things

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Hopefully 89th’s the charm as that’s how many attempts I’ve made trying to redesign my personal website since I never quite get satisfied with it. While it’s helpful for soothing my anxieties, I’m getting to a point where it’s eating into the time I could have used making other projects. That’s because I’m bogged down in bikeshedding where instead of focusing on the big picture, I’m focues on silly little things, like making a component which shows the source code of the other components I overthink.

To that end, I’m hoping to use this iteration of my personal website for a while, using the month of March to try and implement the many feature’s I’ve wanted to have here. Big features I want to have include:

  • Move in all of my old posts,
  • schedule more posts in the future (up until the end of the year if I can),
  • Autoscheduling (so I can schedule posts at an arbitraty time rather than a chron job which I’ve tried once),
  • Search and content filtering,
  • Making a website design that does not look like ass (although I’m kinda digging what I have now)
    • doing dark mode properly
    • understand how to design especially without an eye for it
    • add the Recursive font
    • style tables properly.
    • paginate links and micro sections.
  • index the links on this site, a lá Jim Neilsen. There’s some tricky edge cases like templated sections and list pages but I hope to figure it out.
  • improve image handling, particularly suporting multiple image formats. To start off with I want to take easy gains (i.e. convert pngs to modern lossless formats, remuxing JPEGS into JXL) before I figure out how to get them all in the picture element as well as making an overcomplicated image processing pipeline to get the best possible image. I know that means many things but I take it to mean smallest at a given quality where time is irrelevant. Also, handle SVGs better.
  • Add a last FM like think like
  • Improve the site’s information architecture:
    • add a changelog to each posts with updates and notes
    • add a side bar with popular posts and a “today in the past” like thing.
    • figure out how to set up the site’s tags

It’s a lot to try and do in a month but the goal is to see how far I can go and switch to a slower pace where I take more time to polish out a feature. That way I can make other projects, like scanning old family photos.