To-do list for this site

August 24, 2016 — February 7, 2024

Figure 1

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

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

jwz: Waybackify

1 Migrate to Quarto

  • callouts interact badly with float figures

  • form formatting broke again

  • does it still work if I move theme_images to _theme?

  • migrate comments

  • reference section should be collapsed per default

  • figures

    • caption formatting is suspect
    • float images now bump sections, e.g http://localhost:4321/notebook/epistemic_community.html
  • remove blue styling such as mouseover links and form buttons blech

  • site maps, are they submitted?

  • use utility Shortcodes, esp meta

  • use Callout Blocks. There are five types of callouts, including: note, tip, warning, caution, and important. ## gives them a title.

  • templates:

    • site title should not be first in page titles
    • display content warnings and audiences
    • reinstate usability ratings
    • style extra metadata better
    • don’t display ratings on listing pages
    • navbar text too pale incredibly, working out how to fix this took literally hours. I’m not sold on this bootswatch thing.
  • stop github action, publish manually

  • invoke my site scripts in the scripts function

  • check thesis artefacts downloadable

  • exploit about page layout

  • be citeable

  • index should list all content; no one cares about the blog/notebook distinction

  • check redirects still work

  • reinstate keybase proof using site resources

  • improve deploy

  • check .bib files downloadable

  • why does “about” appear twice in the everything index?

  • generate .bib download links

  • more compact citation style

  • does contact form work?

    • style form better
  • do embedded HTML+JS on pages work?

  • google analytics with opt-out and other webberies https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-tools.html#cookie-consent

  • How should I mark some files as scripts?

  • search

    • go to algolia search https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-search.html

    • actually upload index? https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/sending-and-managing-data/send-and-update-your-data/

    • fix algolia search

    • canonical URLs not possible with current quarto and netlify pretty URLs

      • https://docs.netlify.com/routing/redirects/
      • https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls
      • https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/seo-mistakes-i-have-made-and-how-i-fixed-them/
    • submit events to algolia

    • should I kill the crawler?

    • make search submission a post

  • related content

  • add separator images before and after block elements with special tags

  • suppress drafts using Conditional Content

2 Promote

  • A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox

    As you start routing information and putting out blog posts, you will begin to accumulate connections. Useful information will start to stream toward you, turning you into a small hub yourself. This will allow you to collect and curate information and route it back out, which will allow even more people to connect to you, in a flywheel that lets you do increasingly useful and good work. I especially enjoy it when intelligent people attack me; I then invite them to comment on upcoming drafts.

    You can also post to subreddits and forums, like LessWrong or the SlateStarCodex subreddit, that act like intellectual cafés on the internet. Pasting your posts there, it is easy to find community when you are starting out; you don’t have to scream into the void.

3 Maths

4 mail subscription

Style using…

5 Reader mode does not work

Why does body text vanish in reader mode? unsure.

7 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.

7.2 site metadata

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

8 Webmentions

theming and integration work required.

8.1 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.

9 steal tricks from gwern

good tricks

especially regarding linkrot

10 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?

10.1 publications

Let google know my publications.

11 Searching

Get a search I can link to?

Fix safari search styling.

12 Go to page bundle structure

A lot of work; minimal gain for blogdown AFAICS.

13 Images

halftone This pure CSS one is nice.

13.1 media pipeline

Unclear

14 Tracker

I would also like to display most popular pages; that would be fun. I was going to use the netlify analytics api for that but I gave up because

  1. They did not introduce the API after a year of waiting
  2. Their traffic tracking data was swamped by content indexing bots.

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

15 Sort by certainty etc

16 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.

16.1 background

Also, paper texture? Many seamless paper textures here

16.2 margin notes

  • https://gertjanvandenburg.com/blog/how_i_made/
  • hugo-tufte is a fairly active hugo theme for this. AFAICT it needs deeper support for hugo shortcodes than RMarkdown has
  • https://github.com/nstrayer/tuftesque seems more blogdown-focused
  • rmarkdown has built-in support but it’s crazy