What Good is a Number You Can't Call?
This one’s relatively short. I feel like I’ve been posting about Plant🌱Smart a bit too much lately. But I’ve made a small change to how the site displays emergency information and it matters enough to …
Tagged #hugo.
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12 entries over 52 weeks of #hugo activity. Less More
Writing 12 posts
Why I Rebuilt Plant Smart
Back in June I wrote a little blurb that said, in its entirety, “I should update Plant🌱Smart.” Bolder and more visionary words have never been written. So bold, in fact, I went right back to demolishing this …
My Blog Now Ships From My Homelab!
If you’ve given GitHub’s status page a quick glance recently, you’ll immediately see that it’s been going through it. Every outage is a small reminder that maybe we shouldn’t rely too much …
Some Long Overdue Demolition
Two months ago I wrote Some Long Overdue Housekeeping. A post about giving this blog a proper facelift. I untangled my Tailwind setup, modernised Hugo and taught it to drive the compiler natively and generally felt very …
Let Me Show You My Bits
A while back, in Reading Between the Posts, I wired up the home page so the quiet gaps between articles would narrate themselves - “1 bit and 41 changelog events in between”. There was just one tiny problem …
Reading Between the Posts
The front page of this site has always been a plain list of articles. Which would be fine if I wrote longer-form articles a bit more often. I do, however, make code commits to this site far more frequently. I’m …
A Year in Circles... I mean Squares. Or, is it Squircles?
If you scroll up to the top of the home page, you’ll find a pair of little rows of green squircles. It’s my own dumbed-down take on GitHub’s contribution graph. Effectively, it’s the same idea, …
Some Long Overdue Housekeeping
This blog has been quietly chugging along for a while now without me paying it much attention. Which is, I suppose, the whole point of a set-and-forget setup. But “set-and-forget” has a sneaky way of becoming …
A Changelog That Builds Itself
This site has a changelog page. It’s not one I write by hand as it builds itself from my activity on GitHub every time the site deploys. I think it’s a neat little trick. It also spent a solid afternoon …
Printing Ordinal Numbers in Hugo
I’ve been having such a good time building up this website and Hugo has been incredibly fun – and relatively simple – to work with. Though, from time to time, I find myself scratching my head at the absence of a …
My Blog Publishing Setup & Workflow
Late last year I parted ways with Hashnode as the platform of choice for my blog. They pivoted a bit too far into the generative AI space which — to me for a blogging platform — made little to no sense. What? You write …
Testing Markdown Elements
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea …
Bits 3 bits
Page loads had been creeping up again, so I went looking. Turns out I’d been quietly serving enormous screenshots. One post was pulling 5.1 MB of PNGs, and a single one of those was a 1.96 MB app screenshot sitting in a column 736 pixels wide. Oof.
The fix was mostly plumbing. My img shortcode was handing the raw src straight to the <img> tag, so Hugo never got a look in. Everything now goes through one partial that resizes to the width it actually displays at, re-encodes to WebP and emits a srcset, plus width and height so the layout stops jumping around while things load. Markdown images get the same treatment through a render hook. The awkward bit: images under static/ aren’t resources, so Hugo can’t touch them. A second mount in hugo.toml fixes that without breaking any existing URLs.
While I was in there I dealt with the JavaScript. Every page was carrying all seven inline scripts, even the 90-odd pages with no code blocks, no zoomable images and no locked series titles. Those three now load only where they actually do something. The two that genuinely run everywhere moved into one small fingerprinted bundle, so your browser fetches it once for the whole visit instead of re-reading it on every page. I also finally turned on HTML minification, which I’d apparently never bothered with.
Where it landed:
| what | before | after |
|---|---|---|
| Images the site serves | 12.3 MB | 1.5 MB |
| HTML over the wire, mean per page | 10,236 B | 6,671 B |
| Worst offending post, first paint | 5.1 MB | 112 KB |
That last one is about 46 times smaller. Nothing changed visually, which was the whole point. The sparks still spark and the locked titles still scramble.
One last silly thing. I added a new short code to style “Plant Smart” as “Plant🌱Smart”. Fun!
Having a play with a more dynamic menu drawer. Just working out the kinks on smaller screens.
Decided to introduce a new projects page to showcase some of the bigger things I’m working on. I’m still working out the kinks and I’m not 100% sold on the current design. Each card is powered by a .toml based datasource in Hugo, contains a kind of linear heatmap of activity related to the associated project’s tag as well as the 5 latest related posts. Good enough to publish, I guess.
I also can’t decide on which activity graph animation I like the most. 😅