Now

I've started writing a book again. I spend about 4-8 hours a day working on these novels, so it's difficult to update the site and keep a consistent pace at the same time.

I am also working on getting my first book published. Wish me luck!

Back to writing new articles. Working so much on the backend of the site burned me out for a little bit, but I'm still keeping a consistent update schedule. Having things to review really helps.

One thing that I'm considering is separating each of the /now updates into separate pages that get added to this page automatically. I don't know how I would go around doing that — maybe with frames? — but it would be nice to be able to attach /now to an RSS feed someday.

Until then, I'm happily working on my book reviews.

All of the main pages of the site (Home, About, Archive, Now, Before, Uses, and Sitemap) use the new accessibility standard and I couldn't be happier.

It's time for the articles. It takes me about an hour to convert 1 article to the new stylesheet, and I want to convert all of the articles. That's a lot of hours!

For a little while it may seem as though the site is not being updated, but I assure you there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes. My goal is to convert at least 1 article per day.

Thank you for your patience.

I'm keeping the box-shadow transitions.

The long and short of it: Using ::after pseudo-elements would work except for the fact that CSS will not let you translate them and keep them behind their parent at the same time. I later came up with a "shotgun" solution of replacing all of the shadows with actual elements, which does work, but it's just as jittery as box-shadow transitions and even less optimized.

So, I came up with a trick — eliminating the jitter on certain box-shadows by applying a "pre-transform" of translate(0, 0) to keep them locked to the pixel grid and then moving them by the pixel. It keeps all of the little flair tabs buttery smooth and lets me focus on other, more important features like the Style Drawer — which is also now fixed.

The site is highly responsive and feeling great on the index page. I'm going to do some work to make sure that screen readers work and to allow users to shut off the animations, and then the focus will be on applying this new standard to all of the main pages.

Wish me luck. I'll be back again.

After many days of studying and refactoring, the first round of CSS optimizations are here. I'm working with a very small sample size — the index and the Witch Hat Atelier article — and using a separate stylesheet so that I can make big changes without affecting the entire layout of the site.

And oh boy, is it affected. All of the html, all of the CSS was rebuilt completely from scratch with performance, readability, and proper naming in mind. If you take a look at the html of the index versus any other page, you'll notcie that it's already a radically different beast (even though it looks essentially the same).

Right now I'm working towards smooth CSS transitions; that means removing all of the box-shadows and replacing them with ::after pseudo-elements. It means changing how the Style Drawer works on every single page. It's a huge project! Why am I doing it?

Well, the truth is that this site is five years old. When I started working on it, I didn't know anything about web design. I named classes based on sheer instinct and used all of the wrong html tags. And after years of using the site that way, I can't rebuild the site's scaffolding without tearing the whole thing down and rebuilding it. It's that unsteady.

I've rebuilt this site multiple times. It gets easier each time. As I learn more about web design, I make more decisions that mean less rebuilding and more building. Now, I'm at a level where I believe that this site will meet a public standard — not just my own.

It's a long journey, and I'm still on it, but this site is my home. And I want it to be the best that it can be.

The first few requests for review copies have gone through. I am officially going to start reviewing books!

This marks the end of me working on the /uses page and the return to regular article posting, though I can never help myself. I'm sure that there will be even more updates after I finish saying this.

At least I'm having fun!

After working through some issues with my CSS, I'm thinking of revisiting some important pages like /index, /uses, and /now. BEM (Block, Element, Modifier) seems like a good approach to fixing some of the problems I've had in the past, but it would require an html rewrite — not something that I can do easily on a site that already has two dozen pages.

The solution (as it exists in my head) is to create a new CSS standard for just /index by creating a second stylesheet. Since only pages that get active changes need the new standard, I can safely leave old articles to become outdated. Maybe that's a horrifying thought — leaving a digital trail of outdated nonsense — but I'm one woman working my ass off, so the internet is just going to have to work with me for now.

I've finally finished the /uses page. The thought of having to work on it again is going to give me a migraine, but if I have to do that in order to make the site easier to develop in the future, then that's what I'm going to have to do.

Wish me luck...

Right now I'm working on updating this page (read: fixing all of the problems with it) and getting the /uses page ready for its big debut.

This is probably the most work I've done on the site since its big redesign back in 2024. Since the actual shape of the site is the same, it's hard to think of it as a change... but looking at the screen right now, I have to acknowledge how much work is going into this.

It's been a while since I've had a real blog.

This post serves as the beginning of the now page, which I'm really quite proud of (especially since I got it all together in one night). I hope you like the design. The Pillars of Creation have been one of my favorite space objects for a really long time. Does the dither effect look nice on your screen, too?

For the time being, updates to the now page will be short and frequent. That's more or less the goal. I'm going to stick to an informal style and not do any editing; with a bit of effort it will be a nice contrast to the main letter. It feels nice to take it easy, at least!

I never know how to end these things.