Walden RSS

I posted before that this blog is still not that pretty. Mainly because I was trying to not fiddle with the design too much, as it’s a time sink hole for me.#

Well today I did actually tidy up the looks slightly. Nothing crazy. Just a bit more padding here. A changed font size there.#

But the biggest change is a custom font. I was using Georgia and Helvetica11 Or Arial on Windows. before. And I really wanted to avoid custom fonts simply because it slows down the site as the fonts have to be downloaded. But I just love typography too much.#

I’m using Heliotrope. I kind of forgot I had a licence for it to be honest, until I happily found it in my /fonts folder on my Mac.#

As the description of it says, it’s “nei­ther sans nor serif”. It’s a very interesting font. I often struggle to choose between serif and sans-serif fonts. I love the beauty of the former. But struggle to resist the cleanness of the later. Heliotrope is a great middle ground.#

Here’s the blog on an iPhone 15:#

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But I have to say, I think the blog looks at its best in dark mode:#

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Walden.blog now gets a 100 PageSpeed Insights score.#

I found it interesting that Google (who runs the tool) punishes you for lazy loading images where in the past it used to punish you for not doing it. I wonder why. For A.I. crawlers perhaps?#

Last year I finally got a 4K monitor. I still have two 13-year-old 27" Apple Thunderbolt displays to the left and right. But my main monitor is a 32" Samsung 4K monitor11 SAMSUNG ViewFinity S7 LS32D700EAUXXU 4K Ultra HD 32" VA LED Monitor - Black. So when I'm building/designing things like this blog I'm looking at a 4K monitor. And the first thing I realised when I started using 4K is just how tiny things like text look. But plenty of people are still on HD monitors. So it's always a bit of a shock how big this blog looks when I view it on my office’s HD monitor. It's tough – what do you design for? The new (4K)? Or the old (HD)?#

Walden.blog still isn’t beautiful, but I’m trying to focus on features and functionality over beauty right now.#

Every site I have make I fiddle endlessly with the look. I’m trying to keep Walden light and clean.#

I’ll add some niceness at some point I’m sure. But I’m actually getting used to its bareness. I’m even growing to like its serif font.#

And now that things like little side images and footnotes are supported, its starting to look like a proper blog.#

And I’m very proud to say that it’s still just two files11 If there’s no images on the page anyway. – the HTML page itself and the CSS stylesheet. I’m especially pleased I’ve managed to not add any JavaScript yet.#

Either way, I’m determined to keep this site under 100 KB (it’s currently 5-30 KB depending on page size).#

How Walden.blog looks on mobile with night mode turned on: #

New feature added to the blog:#

• Wide images the go outside the bounds of the main body#
• Little images that can go to the left/right and the posts text wraps around#

Below is just a test of these features, so please ignore 🙂#

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut scelerisque nisl nec velit pulvinar tempor. Nullam congue facilisis ligula id hendrerit. Suspendisse ut neque leo. Nunc consequat efficitur dui. Vivamus scelerisque turpis placerat, sodales mi ac, rutrum nisi. Proin eleifend interdum magna in gravida. Donec ante sapien, efficitur accumsan elit ut, gravida consectetur est. In ornare interdum risus, at dignissim erat dictum sit amet. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. In fermentum orci eu faucibus tempus. Curabitur nec porttitor nisl. Vivamus sodales nibh turpis, vitae tincidunt dolor condimentum vitae. Nam eget ex vel felis tincidunt sodales vulputate ac est. Etiam felis erat, cursus sit amet interdum a, faucibus et augue.#

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Integer eget velit laoreet, maximus leo ut, cursus metus. Pellentesque quis mi ut nibh interdum pellentesque. Ut volutpat orci ex. Pellentesque bibendum tincidunt lacus, vel suscipit lacus ullamcorper fringilla. Vestibulum eget consectetur ante. Fusce viverra sed lacus vel posuere. Cras ut eros efficitur, ultricies sem eu, accumsan arcu. Etiam sodales tempor elit, nec sagittis enim tincidunt at. Etiam ultricies hendrerit libero a ultrices. Sed pulvinar, eros sit amet consequat sagittis, ex turpis faucibus libero, at aliquam orci ante a risus. Mauris in egestas ligula. Etiam scelerisque sapien lobortis eleifend efficitur. Integer ornare vestibulum vulputate. Nullam faucibus odio eget urna fermentum, ac finibus dolor ultricies.#

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Quisque suscipit est vulputate neque lacinia dignissim. Vivamus tincidunt metus purus, vel scelerisque mi accumsan sit amet. Suspendisse ex arcu, sollicitudin nec viverra et, pellentesque ut dui. Etiam tincidunt sed dui non tempus. Donec risus magna, luctus in pretium in, aliquam eu purus. Quisque pretium nulla sit amet nunc vestibulum, a tempor turpis vehicula. Praesent a sodales odio, ullamcorper volutpat libero. Etiam mattis condimentum sem sed dictum. Nam sit amet blandit turpis. Proin rutrum, erat facilisis vehicula scelerisque, dolor metus interdum dui, vitae posuere magna metus quis lorem. Nullam interdum felis nec sem hendrerit, sed tempor nunc varius. Nunc cursus odio non laoreet ultrices. Morbi odio purus, aliquet quis pulvinar eu, euismod nec elit. Fusce ut lectus vel nibh tincidunt lacinia. Curabitur ut ullamcorper dui.#

Added keyboard shortcuts to Walden.blog. This is a post to test if hitting CMD + Enter will publish it.#

AI has implemented footnotes for me, apparently. So I'd like to try them out. Let's give it a go...#

This should have a footnote.11 This is the first footnote#

This is the second footnote.22 Another footnote. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since 1966, when designers at Letraset and James Mosley, the librarian at St Bride Printing Library in London, took a 1914 Cicero translation and scrambled it to make dummy text for Letraset's Body Type sheets. It has survived not only many decades, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised thanks to these sheets and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker and Microsoft Word including versions of Lorem Ipsum. With some text after it!#

Let’s see if I can add a footnote on mobile.33 This should work!#

Another?44 One final, baby footnote#

I often reference the book I'm reading in posts. It's good to have a central place to see all my posts about a book, so I was adding a unique ID. For example, B204. An ID is a lot shorter than having to write out the book title and author. However, it also doesn't tell the user anything about the book, and my tags list was getting clogged up by these IDs.#

So, I got Claude Fable 5.1 to build a separate metadata system for books! They're like tags, but just separated out for books. And it means I can show the title, author, year published, and also cover art!#

It needs a bit of tweaking, but it will do for now.#

Note: please ignore the books attached to this post. I'm just testing out the ability to hopefully add multiple books to a post.#

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The blog is actually looking decent in night mode on mobile.#

Actually, I was lying about this blog not doing anything to make images more efficient in my last post.#

It is! It's reducing the width/height and also doing some sort of compression, I presume. Clever Claude.#

When I create a website I very quickly start adding things which increase the load time. Custom fonts, JavaScript to do various things, complex CSS.#

So I'm rather enjoying how lightweight the site currently is (when there's no images involved anyway. I need so sort something out there, as currently there's no resizing or CDN, just the raw images delivered from a server in the Netherlands). Your average post page is about 6 KB:#

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And there's just two files to load the page – the page itself and the CSS:#

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Will I be tempted to add things? Probably. But there's something magical about how fast it loads right now. Someone could visit my blog on dialup and I'm sure it would load fast still.#

It's almost spooky how quickly things loads. It feels like I'm loading local files.#