gmartinez v1.0

Release Notes

I haven’t done any meaningful changes to the site since it first went up in 2015. This document covers all the changes I’ve made in the last month.

Some stats: This release spans 123 commits spanning 27 files with 602 additions and 754 deletions. The average page weight has dropped ~77% (~60KB -> 14KB). I should start adding a couple images.

Highlights

Removed Third-Party Tracking

I’ve removed Google Analytics from my site for a couple reasons. The first one being I never look at it. The others being the content of the site is not influenced by what people are viewing, there are not any conversions to track, and this site doesn’t need to be sending Google more information about three people that read it (hi, whomever you are).

Now Using Hugo’s Asset Pipeline

When I first built this site there was no asset pipeline for Hugo so I had to roll my own. I wrote a pretty ugly hack in order to inline the minimal CSS/JS the site uses. I’d cat all the JS/ CSS files into tmp files, process the files using uglify-css / uglify-js, and finally inject that into a partial which was then included in the header/footer templates. This worked fine, but I didn’t have any watchers set up for CSS/JS so making an update meant no live-reloading. I’d have to make build when making those types of updates. Using Hugo’s Asset Pipeline has enabled those live-reloads to be handled by Hugo directly and simplified the build process.

Simplified Build Process

By running Hugo’s Asset Pipeline I was able to simplify my Makefile by quite a bit. There are now only a deploy, build, and clean targets. On top of that I was able remove the dependency on NodeJS. Hugo’s Pipeline handles minifying CSS. The site no longer has any JS running so I also removed uglify-js.

Removed Javascript

There’s no interactivity on the site currently so I was able to remove all Javascript. This includes:

  • Fittext - Fittext was cool, but I much prefer smaller, more easily read headers now.
  • HighlightJS - Hugo has built in syntax highlighting. I haven’t enabled it yet, but may in the future when needed

Meta Tags

The following have been removed:

  • author
  • twitter:card, twitter:site, twitter:title, twitter:description, twitter:creator
  • og:type, og:title, og:description, og:image, og:site_name
  • google-site-verification

I don’t share my content on Facebook or Twitter and don’t expect others to so these tags have been removed. Author was removed since I don’t post to Google+ either and Google+ is dead. Google Webmaster Tools was removed since my domain is authenticated via DNS.

The following tags were added:

  • descriptions
  • titles
  • canonical

The site finally use description / title tags on articles instead of a global one for all pages Previously all canonical tags pointed to the homepage. Oops. I realized it, but never got around to updating it. Now canonical tags point to their respective articles.

Updated to Hugo v0.62.2-Extended

I was running Hugo 0.51. The update was mostly painless. There was an issue where a variable I was outputting lists of articles with Data.Pages wasn’t working, but that was easily changed to Site.RegularPages As I write this I see that Hugo v0.64 is out. Already out of date again.

Dark Mode

The site no longer has to burn your eyes with it’s white background. Dark mode has arrived.

Misc Style / Layout Updates

These are mostly smaller details such as:

  • Added padding on table cells so they no longer bump up against borders
  • Removed a commented out stylesheet tag that was unused since all my CSS is inlined.
  • Increased font size to 18px
  • Removed all caps from titles since it makes it more difficult to read
  • Removed letter-spacing between dates that made them difficult to read
  • Made table headings stand out
  • Removed different link colors for links in footer. Better that all links look similar.
  • At one point there was a fade in animation for styling. I’ve removed this.
  • Removed a bunch of styles related to the navigation alignment
  • Removed subtitled sections and markup. This was never used
  • Split CSS file into multiple SCSS files to make it easier to work on specific sections
  • Dates are now Month Year instead of Month Day, Year
  • Added themeing variables for easy switches to font colors, background, accent color, etc
  • Switched article list from two column to one

Misc Updates to Articles

  • I switched out all the hardcoded HTML in articles to use their Markdown equivilent. This mostly applied to table, pre, and code tags.