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November 2024 Site Updates

Published on November 30th, 2024, 672 words, 3 minutes to read

A lot of stuff happened on this site in November. Here's a summary of all of them!

Comments

The most significant change and feature I'm proud of is the comments on this site. Some readers have already asked me how they could leave feedback on some posts, which got me thinking. I saw others that employ a variety of different options, which are:

• Webmentions
• GitHub-backed comment widgets (like Giscus)
• Comment widgets via self-hostable options (like Comentario)
• Fediverse-backed comments

I opted for the last option after I saw Wheelsbot's website using it (and later finding out it's just based on Lume's Simple Blog template). I reimplemented the web components with my spin, creating several components instead of just one to split the markup between them nicely.

Additionally to having Fediverse support, I also added Bluesky support with another web component. This allows me to specify two post URLs, which are then displayed below, highlighting the post you need to reply to to get your post listed here.

Every URL fetched is cached for a bit, so repeated loading does not cause endless requests to my instance/Bluesky.

Design and accessibility aren't all done yet, and I'll improve that in the future, but otherwise, I'm really satisfied with this solution!

Feel free to try out commenting below!

Updated Contact page

With Bluesky becoming more popular and more people moving off Twitter, I gave my contact page a much-needed brush-up.

The updated design now features categories for all the social sites and contact options. I also added the feature to "deprecate" certain things that still need to be listed (just as some sort of verification that it's indeed me) but inform users that they should use those to contact me as I'm elsewhere, preferably.

Performance

I shrunk the general size of assets being fetched by 50 kilobytes!

I love optimizing my websites as much as possible, and considering I'm utilizing Tailwind in a way it's not supposed to be used (with a bunch of @apply rules), I was wondering why the CSS was over 100kB as it's just a bunch of utility classes. Debugging it a bit, I noticed that applying the prose classes was probably the worst thing I could do regarding components, as it duplicated the entire Typography CSS for each element I applied it on. Removing these applications has cut off most of the size.

After that massive improvement, I decided to move most of my site's design elements into components and get rid of all @apply usages, or most of them. This was a massive refactoring of the entire site, and in the end, I managed to shave off 55 kilobytes from my styles.css file (down from the original 107 kilobytes).

There are still some elements left, but I don't think I'll be able to get below 100 kilobytes to join the 512KB Club Green Team.

I also added a Kitchen Sink page to better keep track of what I have in my "design system".

I wrote quite a few blog posts in November:

• Out of the Loop(s)
• Make your own Personal Hub
• Recap of TYPO3 Community Sprint Q4 2024

No new webrings this month, but some buttons have made their way:

If you want your button added to my site, don't hesitate to get in touch with me!

This is pretty much everything that happened on the site in November. There were quite a few changes in code, with almost 90 commits. If you are interested in how this site is built, feel free to check out the source code on GitHub!