Maintenance — Update 18/06/2023
Estimated Reading Time – 3 minutes
Heya, HunterHog here, writer/maintainer of the blog. Dropping in to give a quick compiled update on all the changes that have been rolling out since this blog was launched on the 13th of this month.
Tags
Posts will now have tags displayed at the bottom of them indicating what categories they belong to. Mostly future proofing for when lots of articles exist, as this will allow you to search by tag to find posts that interest you within that topic's sphere.
I eventually intend on aggregating all the existing tags by category in a separate, pinned post to make the browsing experience better before it becomes too messy due to the amount of posts.
Styling
Anyone who viewed this blog on its opening day might remember the aggressive high-contrast dark theme it had. It was a little eye-searing.
I've moved to this cooler, lower contrast theme (courtesy of FOSStodon) with a few personal changes such as links now having a thick blue underline to not distract the reading experience by altering the text color, the styling of tags, and images now being slightly darker until you hover on them to view them at full brightness, which should make it easier on the eyes.
WebAIM says that this styling should look perfectly fine for reading in terms of text/foreground and background contrast, but if anyone struggles reading this blog then let me know, I'm still grappling with accessibility.
Reading Time
Posts now display a reading time estimate under their titles, powered by the Read-o-Meter, so that anyone casually opening this blog or receiving updates on their RSS feed can now more easily decide when to dedicate time to reading an article depending on how long it might take and how much time they have.
This estimate of course isn't accurate depending on your reading speed but it counts it for the average reading speed of 200 wpm.
Truncated Posts
Browsing the main page of this blog will no longer be plagued by posts jumping at you with their full length immediately.
They are now truncated at an appropriate point instead until you choose to click their title or the 'Read More' link to open it fully.
Last Updated
I'm moving to having a Last Updated section at the bottom of posts, to keep track of when posts have last been touched since being published in case something substantial changes.
An Apology
If you follow this blog through its RSS feed, you might've had my On Battlemaps & Encounters article pop up on whatever your reader of choice is (and if you don't have one or are looking for one, may I recommend FreshRSS?) a few times as I was rolling out styling changes and edits accordingly.
Sorry about that! That should happen considerably less often – or not at all – going forward as the changes to this blog settle.
If this didn't happen to you, then great!
Looking Towards The Future
My next article is in the works, and should be out in a week or so. Going forward, I'll be giving these kinds of updates as needed if I have to make changes regarding hosting or accessibility.
Additionally, I plan on having a pinned Changelog article documenting and listing all these maintenance articles as they pile up over the years. Might always come in handy, you never know, and my inner sysadmin heart needs it.
That's all from me for the time being, though. Thanks for checking in!