Blog Updates
30 Nov 2018Yes, it’s that time of year again. I have updated the blog! You can find more information below.
Analytics
Google Analytics are back. I understand that some people may not like being tracked, but at that point you should have an add or tracking blocker installed. I recommend looking at the Brave Browser, which is what I personally use, or installing uBlock Origin. The reason I have added this back to the blog is that I have noticed links to this blog appearing in various places over the web, and I would like to be able to detect how much traffic I am getting from these links.
I wholeheartedly understand if you disapprove of the use of Google Analytics. If anyone is able to suggest a better service, that collects less user data, please open an issue in the GitHub repository for this site. I will gladly change providers as long as the new one is also free.
Theme Updates
I forked the Lanyon repository and applied all the currently pending pull requests. This should keep everything up to date with the latest version of Jekyll. To make it easier for anyone else looking for that information, I created a new PR in the lanyon repository to my mergers. You can also find them under my GitHub site.
Fonts
Somehow the fonts on the site got nuked during the upgrade. They are back in place now.
Page Speed
The new updates have not yet been optimized. Previously I used Google’s page load speed thingy to optimize the site. Maintaining that by hand is one of the reasons the upgrade was so painful to implement. I’m looking for a way to automate the process the same way that I have currently automated the link tests that I run prior to a push. This will likely involve writing a new process in the Rakefile, so it will take some time. In the meantime, the only thing that is really being pulled is a few font files and the analytics script, so the load impact shouldn’t be too bad.
Organization
There is a weird issue between rendering the site on my local machine and the way GitHub pages renders it on their side. To solve this I created a new template and appended it to all the pages that should not appear in the sidebar. Hopefully this strikes a good balance between being able to use standardized templates, as well as ease of use. The new template simply imports the existing page template under a new name.
Images
While I am primarily focused on text on this blog, I have recently included a few images. These are also hosted on GitHub, so I cleaned up the way the image directory is laid out. This has impacted all of one image, but should make any expansion in the future much easier.
Liquid Changes
There was some issue with the way the Liquid on the Tags page was written. This has been corrected accordingly.
About Page
The about page has been correctly updated! My view on some of the listed issues has evolved in recent years. You will now find those things struckthrough with comments added underneath.
Future Improvements
There is still minifying, javascript inlining, and font work to be done to make the page run faster. Additionally, the tags page is simply a disaster. Between all of that and the project pages, there is still a lot left to be done. Hopefully, all will be accomplished in time.
Conclusion #### {: #blog-updates-conclusion }
Hopefully all of these changes make the site a bit more enjoyable to use. I do understand if the use of analytics bothers you. Please make an issue in the tracker, or if someone already has, comment accordingly. If there are enough people using this site that honestly care, I might consider removing the analytics while I do further research.