Day 2

Day 2: Technical Blog, Revision

Active Link!

It’s a bit later than I’d like, so this will hopefully be succinct (read: there will be extensive rambling and minimal content).

Goal

My goal today was to touch up some of the things that didn’t go so well yesterday, namely my domain, the site organization, and the fancy CSS stuff.

Domain

So here is how defyingentropy.ml is doing:

Not off to a good start?

Just kidding, I am hosting my blog at the quartz. subdomain!

Everything working as it should be

I didn’t need to do a ton on this front. After about 30 hours I checked the DNS records with dig and actually got a result

All is well, except for Arcturus'¹ battery.

At that point, my site worked just fine.

I’m considering migrating to the apex domain since I’m not actually using it for anything (yet?) but I don’t currently have the mental fortitude to do that.

Structure

I have updated the structure of my site. My index page now actually features a list of posts, which I might update to generate procedurally and some pseudo-philosophical rambling.

CSS

The bulk of today’s work time was spent trying to transform my site from the atrocious mess it was yesterday to something better looking.

Doing so required taking a deep dive into Firefox’s development tools. Using them to reverse engineer Jacky’s CSS was actually quite an educational experience. I now have a much better grasp of how properties are inherited from stylesheets but I don’t quite understand how CSS interacts with Hugo.

My devtool setup for reverse engineering.

I first managed to center the text and actually make the descriptor field appear, that was a good start.

Then, with some borrowed CSS from Jacky I got the rotations with color working!

Reflection

I made good progress today but also invested less time in the project than expected.

My main learning experience was the CSS, I think my “messing around until something works” approach actually went pretty well. When I’m creating something from scratch I should probably actually read docs first though. I’m sure that I’ve done some unintelligent stuff with my CSS, such as having /assets/title.scss that exists exclusively to make the title page on my index smarter. I probably should have implemented a class or something. I have not figured out how Jacky does it without making all h1 fields large.

I’m very happy to have something I can provide a (working!) link to.

Tomorrow I’m expecting to have a similar amount of time so I’m going to read more about Hugo and customize things to better suit me. Hopefully it’ll be the final day I spend working on the garden exclusively.