End of September Blog Updates

Blog Theme

Despite how busy everything has been, I’ve managed to squeeze in a couple of updates to my blog. The first one is a bit of a redesign. I’ve toned down the RPG vibe and moved it to a dark mode color scheme and since Halloween is right around the corner I added a little holiday decoration to the top. I love the cute dancing skeleton. I did take a screen shot of the last design and I’ll add it to my change log category soon.

The biggest change is the structure. I decided to de-emphasize the short posts for the time being. They will appear at the top section (one at a time) for a bit and will remain on category pages but I’ve removed them from the archive list.

The second largest change was that I built this theme to be more general, most of my others have been so highly customized that I couldn’t really share the theme. I would tie parts directly to how I named categories or hard-code links. This time I built it with the intent to share, meaning all my personal customizations are in the Custom CSS and Custom footer part of Micro.blog. Now, I do have quite a few updates I want to do before releasing it as a public Micro.blog theme, but I’m happy with the progress I made this weekend. And just to set expectations, I would like to share it before the new year, but… I do have two tai chi and kung fu tournaments I’m prepping for so I won’t have much time to work on it until December.

Code Editor

It has also been on my radar that Glitch shutdown and I had a couple of older blog posts that linked to little projects I had hosted on them. Which is one more reason to host my own code samples. So, I built my own little “lite” code editor this weekend. It can only handle HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and then output the result in a iframe. Using my Fastmail storage I set up a folder to host these code samples as little websites so I can embed them in blog posts. Though I only have one up at the moment for an upcoming blog post you can check them out at code.heyloura.com (Note, this one loops through all RGB color values… so 256 * 256 * 256, which means the result tab takes a couple of seconds to load). It is also interactive so if you make changes to the CSS, HTML, or JS you’ll see updated changes in the “Result” tab.

Now that I have this built out I can create more samples and go back to replace my broken Glitch ones when I have some time. Yay!

Weird Web October

Last year I started strong… for all of two days 😜. My goal is a least three submissions this time around. So to begin prepping I moved my prior submissions off of Micro.blog which I had been building with my theme. They now have a spot here at https://weirdweboctober.heyloura.com/. Then! as an added bonus I completed one more submission for last year’s Day 3 prompt Color. Hence my one current code sample, which I used to do the calculations :)

If I have time, I’d like to fill up all the prompts for last year and this year… but I’m giving myself an unlimited deadline to get it done.

October plans

This is more of a personal todo list to remind me, but I need to go through and

• Update my broken Glitch code samples on blog posts
• Update any Weird Web October links in blog posts
• Write a post on “What colors on a webpage work equally as well on white and black backgrounds while maintaining Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?”
• Write a post about building my little code editor
• Have fun with at least three Weird Web October submissions!