Winter Cleaning, 2022

It was time for some cleanup around these parts, so here’s a list of what was fixed.

I spent some time this winter diving deep into this website and cleaning up what was initially a lot of add-on, messy, and less-than-optimally organized code. I also made some design updates and basically rounded off a lot of sharp edges. Here’s a roundup, for posterity:

Design changes

  • Standardized link hover states
  • Removed sunruise lines from homnepage
  • Fixed heading sizes in article-stubs
  • Changed up and fixed some dark mode colors and styles
  • Standardized button and form specs across the site
  • Fixed some movie rating layout issues
  • New menu button location and fixed header
  • Tweaked the Blog header to use a less-repeating image of the Chicago skyline

Code cleanup

  • Moved seasonal styles to date-conditional class
  • Restructured articles layout, and basically re-wrote the entire structure of every page
  • Changed colors to use hsl()
  • Converted all font-size px values to rem
  • Fixed some broken links across the site
  • Converted all modals to the new <dialog> element
  • Changed the primary branch from master to main

Content

What’s next

This was a clean-up and bug-fix phase, and now I have a list of some enhancement, performance, accessibility, and usability fixes to come next. Not to mention that it’s about time for a design refresh soon. This is a 2018 special that’s been going strong, and I’m happy with it still, but the itch is forming.

  • Core Web Vitals work
  • Lazy loading ratings images
  • Performance! Currently scoring a 60 (94 on desktop) on the homepage. Embarrassing. Edit: That was actually some adblocking scripts getting picked up. All good with 100 now!