To-do list for this site

How did you get in here? How did you get inside the sausage factory? Watch your fingers.

Things I am doing to spruce this place up as part of yak shaving my academic writing workflow.

render better

blogdown::build_site(build_rmd = "timestamp")

or even

options(blogdown.files_filter = blogdown::timestamp_filter)
blogdown::build_site(build_rmd = TRUE)

should I smooth this by switching to cutting-edge blogdown?

remotes::install_github('rstudio/blogdown')

Better HTML HEAD metadata

HEAD documents the recommended tags for maximising social spread and suchlike from a website.

Social interactions

Some of these are hard to do with my static site — which is to say, hard like ordinary dynamic websites are, not frictionless like my humble static site is.

Comments

Embedded serverless comments would be nice comments.

Webmentions

theming and integration work required.

ActivityPub

A.k.a. ActivityStreams 2.0. I think this standard is real and is sometimes claimed to subsume comments and webmentions 🤷‍♂ It looks like there is variable effort involved in enabling the suite of features and widges here. Verifying my id in ActivityPub is chill. All the mutual sharing of data involves cryptographical signing etc. Out of scope for now.

better code highlighting

For new themes, via https://bookdown.org/yihui/blogdown/templates.html#how-to

Alternatively for my theme it is just in the config. https://github.com/rstudio/blogdown/issues/360#issuecomment-457395421

these are both via highlight.js; I could use the server-side pandoc-based solutions such as pygments or chroma. Explanations of those by Maëlle Salmon : https://ropensci.org/technotes/2020/04/30/code-highlighting/ These look harder to integrate into Rmarkdown posts, but ok for native hugo https://gohugo.io/content-management/syntax-highlighting/

Also code folding.

steal tricks from gwern

https://www.gwern.net/About

especially regarding linkrot

citations

render citations as data? Or at least link to the .bib file? See how radix does this?

export coins metadata?

or highwire metadata

Why are citations showing up as a sub div of the last div? Can I change that?

make an explicit header?

Images

apply a filter to images to match background. (but how to opt out?)

thumbnails

Put images in front matter, or even page bundles. The latter looks fragile and harder to navigate; I’ll probably settle for a minimum-viable option that puts images in header metadata. I wonder if there is a pandoc pipe that could make that easier, or if I should do it with a python markdown parser e.g. with a TreeProcessor, or a BeautifulSoup parser, or the syntax tree-friendly Mistletoe.

Tracker

I would also like to display most popular pages; that would be fun. But I will wait for netlify to release their API rather than getting prematurely excited about that.

If I want to work around in the mean time, Jim Nielson shows how.

NEtlify API spec https://open-api.netlify.com/ Python client https://pypi.org/project/openapi-core/ community https://community.netlify.com/t/support-guide-understanding-and-using-netlifys-api/160

Sort by certainty etc

AMP

Google’s accelerated mobile pages. Seems a huge effort. https://themes.gohugo.io/tags/amp/ https://gohugo-amp.gohugohq.com/

Look nice

I made my own theme; it has various wonderful features such as being simple and easy to understand. However, it has the problem that I am no graphical designer.

TBD: choose a monospace font so I can control the size better.

margin notes