9^th January 2021

Sidenotes #

Sidenotes are awesome, and after taking a look at Koos Loijesteijn post about them, I figured it would be great to implement them on here, too.

I decided not to, for now, for three main reasons:

1. They are impossible to be implemented in Markdown, they need a lot of HTML and I don’t have the skills for making a Jekyll plugin to transform footnotes in sidenotes (but it may be a great idea to create one)
2. I could easily create an {% include sidenotes.html %} where I could pass as arguments both the note content and the word linked to it, but it wouldn’t satisfy me for two reasons:
   1. In the case of printing, it would be a great mess.
   2. On other readers or Markdown parsers outside of Jekyll I’d have a massive chunk of unrendered ugly text
3. Considered the reasons above, it's not worth it. I use footnotes very few times (even though I massively over-use parentheses (as I am doing right now)) and with the lovely arrow¹ automatically created, it’s painless to use them.

Further reading #

• A lovely overview of sidenotes implementation techniques and a thorough explanation of their philosophy
• Koos Loijesteijn’s sidenotes source code
• Tufte CSS

14 March 2021

Minimalizing #

Minimalizing

If my personality was a website (and it is), it would be colorful, full of images, crazy, yet meaningful and emphatic.

The challenge, nevertheless, is not about achieving this goal by stuffing tons of content in a webpage and in its code, but it is rather about finding the perfect equilibrium between what accomplishes the purpose of transmitting the right message to the viewer/reader and what bloats the site and makes the user experience a distracting mess.

I am personally trying to fine-tune this website’s design in order to get to the perfect middle way.
I would love to make this website strictly minimal, by using little or no CSS, no webfonts, few super-tiny images; but, unfortunately, this is not who I am and it would not express my actual character.
On the other hand, I absolutely do not want this website to be a burden more than an enjoyment to navigate: loading times should not be too long and the user experience needs to be smooth and pleasant.

Below, I gather some quotes, links, thoughts and resources about this topic. I log in the [[Website log]] all of the decisions I make about what features this website should or should not have, and why.

Writings #

• Big Fat Websites, a blog post by Herman Martinus (who is also the creator of the super light and minimal blogging platfrom Bearblog)

Analytics #

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Algolia Search #

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1. Lovely arrow test -> ↩