Minor Site Updates

Since the v3 update I've made a few improvements.

First, what broke

Nuxt 3 changed the folder structure, and now what was once /static is now /public. This is well and good, aside from the fact that gitlab-ci expects your website assets to all be in the /public folder after building. After some tinkering I got it working by renaming the /public directory before moving the generated static site output to the build directory.

What's more cool though is the stuff I worked on after smoothing out the v3 release.

Incremental Improvements + RSS Overhaul

If anyone happened to be subscribed to my site's feed, they would have noticed it was broken pretty badly for a day or two. I broke it trying to change my RSS feed from just including a short preview or summary of the article, to actually containing the article itself. I think it's a much nicer experience personally. I've added a step to the build process that reads the markdown file for each article (as queried from Content's sqlite database) and processes it using Showdown to turn it into html. I actually spent a bunch of time coming up with a good RegEx sequence that would let me trim out the frontmatter metadata from the MDC files but it turned out Showdown has built-in support for metadata so I removed that bit of code.

Another change I made was to add in nuxt-lazy-hydrate. It seems to have sped up the experience of the site quite a bit. As it currently stands I don't need to have any client-side hydration at all - there's nothing dynamic on the whole site that can't be generated at build-time. I know I'm not really flexing the strengths of Vue.js with my site - it might as well be static html + css, but that doesn't mean I don't have plans for it later. Plus, it's pretty composable and gives me the flexibility of pre-processing with Node, and also gives me the prospect of some day hosting the site in a live environment rather than a static fashion.

Lastly, I've also added an html validator and have been trying to get rid of all the invalid html from my site, and I've also been making incremental changes to improve the accessibility of my site for screen readers, navigation, and generally following HTML conventions and tag specifications more carefully. You may notice the navigation bar in the header has been cleaned up a bit, and some of the tap targets around the site are a bit easier to get, as well as some things being generally formatted nicer on mobile devices. I'll keep tweaking stuff as I notice things.

I also made a fun little app as a standalone project / game? / satirical utility? Check it out here if you'd like: Find My Number In PI!.

Oh! I also fixed the music link, so now it properly links to music.morerunes.com and I've updated the header for my bandcamp to match the header for this site, with clickable links.

Possible Future Changes

I'm toying with the idea of incorporating a version for the site, with the commit hash and maybe possibly adding a version history page. I think it'd be a fun little coding challenge, and I also haven't tried using any gitlab APIs (aside from, you know, via git).

I'd like to add xslt styling to the feed to direct anyone who tries to view the rss xml on how to load it into a reader app. There's a decent number of write-ups
on the subject.

That's all for now. I'm sure I'll think of other things to improve or add, but until then I'm pretty stoked about the recent changes.