Maintenance week #3

Maintenance weeks are where I detail website tasks, instead of a regular post. I spend time fixing bugs, updating grammar and posts in general, as well as adding featured images. It varies what I will do, and this posts serves as detailing what has been done.

So while it’s not a post that directly gives value, it helps me keep on top of the library of content that I am acquiring.

Featured images

The main aim of this week was to try get a few featured images out. It’s something I’m going to make more of a consistent thing, when the redesign is complete. Balancing the redesign and writing content, amongst a full time job and life is very tricky. It means it’s necessary, to devote blocks of time, away from writing, so that I can progress.

Colour series

Hero area series

How to use swatches in Illustrator

Challenging

Making featured images is quite challenging. I have focused on doing a quite a few now, during this post and the redesign. Trying to figure out my style and consistency with illustration, is something I’m beginning to nail down.

The more ways I find to illustrate things, my style is going to become clearer. It’s also a challenge to come up with an idea that represents the subject and deliver it in a more timely fashion.

Misc changes

Outside of the featured images it was useful to do some other site maintenance.

Setup for redesign

In addition to adding featured images, I will have two sets of images for each post. The featured image and a thumbnail, the thumbnails aren’t in use now, but they will once the redesign is complete. So I needed a way to define those ahead of time and begin uploading them now.

Time will tell how maintainable this is, but I like to have particular ‘art directed’ control over my images.

Twitter card/opengraph meta

Now that some posts have featured images, it was necessary to get twitter cards and opengraph meta to recognise them too. Images tend to drive more engagement, which may drive more clicks, as and when articles are shared.

Favicon & touch icons

Since updating the logo, it has been something I have been intent on doing, but never got round to it. Creating a favicon was relatively quick, as I had already considered it, when making the logo and drawn small sizes. The touch icons are also quick and simple, but do the job.

Particular markdown links

I discovered a bug in my particular setup for the way I handle posts in markdown. Links were being parsed incorrectly, in specific cases, that I couldn’t quite pin down. Hence why it’s taken so long to notice.

I spent some time making regular HTML links, then realised how much effort it was. I needed to find a more convenient fix, which I was able to.

Sequel Pro tool

I missed off Sequel Pro from my tools post. I realised shortly afterwards, I hadn’t added it. Read the updated article.

That’s it

Amongst these things progress has slowed getting the redesign done. I have made good progress, much of the homepage is coded, but I need to knuckle down and get a significant amount of posts in the schedule.

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