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.

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.

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 bia 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

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 cometime claimed to subsume comments and webmentions 🤷‍♂ It looks easy to verify my id in ActivityPub but all the mutual sharing of data involves cryptographical signing etc. Out of scope for now.

knit to markdown

Instead of to HTML. Many benefit in terms of having better hugo hooks. michael toth’s solution.

citations

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

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

Images

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.

I was using Merriwether which is not great; the punctuation annoys me.

TRialling Garamond.

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

margin notes