I spent ages in the library yesterday evening in a futile search for a book. The author is dead and the book is out of print, but it’s on the course reading list. Unfortunately the more obscure it is the more I want to read it, it pokes my curiosity. Should probably email my professor about it, I suspect he’s got a personal copy, or he knew the author?

So because of that, I got back home late last night, and instead of going straight to bed I thought it would be a good idea to eat loads of nachos, watch part-way though an unexpectedly good film, and mess around with the site CSS.

The layout is slightly different now.

The archive page now uses a different GNU date format. Now instead of spelling out %Y-%M-%D, I just use %F and it fills in Y-M-D automatically. Particularly happy with this because I discovered it by accident, though the end result is exactly the same so it’s probably irrelevant.

Carrying on from that, ‘date posted’ now shows up on posts where ‘categories’ used to be. There’s still some work to do on this but for the moment I’m quite pleased with it. Categories and tags are sort of useless here, I organise posts by date, and throwing in some other system is likely to cause a headache. I’m planning to add a search box in the future, also I want to make the links less flashy.

Boxes have rounded-off corners. I’m torn over this because it has a knock-on effect on images which now also require curvy corners to fit in. Is this better than sharp corners? As a compromise I’ve turned down the effect to only 5 pixels, so it’s subtle, like pro bootstrap web design.

Images are centred and only take up 90% of the width. Looks a bit neater on desktop, and more squished on mobile.

The big thing I’ve done today is changed the deployment process. I complained before that uploading everything via FTP was fiddly not to mention inefficient. Now I’m using rsync over SSH, which synchronises the generated site here with the one on my server. Everything’s now wrapped up to the point where I only need one command to build the site and another to deploy it. It’s as simple as possible. The only downside was that along the way rsync mistakenly wiped the home directory on the server, several times. I only lost a couple of comics that I know of, but it might have also deleted some hidden program files? Nothing’s broken so far so I think it all worked out okay.