Development Log
Updates & Changes made to this website are collected here.
1/8/2023
Section titled 1/8/2023- Rewired the way that blogposts are being rendered; I misused the
pagination
feature of Eleventy, which is meant for paginated content. I now use a custom collection to render the blogposts.
5/22/2022
Section titled 5/22/2022- Added a new site "Work with me"
- Added a new Case Study for "bibianezimba.com"
- Added a new Timeline Entry for my current position at "Lean Coders"
- Made the "hire" page invisible, while it is not needed.
9/28/2021
Section titled 9/28/2021- Blog posts now have OG/Twitter-Card Images that are showing when a link to one of them is shared! I am using Stephanie Eckles
eleventy-plugin-social-images
.
9/28/2021
Section titled 9/28/2021- added a new blog post
- added Fathom Analytics. A big step for me. Hopefully this'll give me some insight into how the website is being received.
- changed the statement on the imprint accordingly
- drafted posts are now visibly highlighted for me, when I look at the site on local
- fixed a small visual bug that caused the main menu to be vertically misaligned
9/2/2021
Section titled 9/2/2021- Refactored the mobile menu interaction to be more accessible. While the initial
:target
was alright, it isn't a good solution because it doesn't provide enough information for the screenreader. Plus, it isn't WCAG compliant with the way that focus is managed. - Refactored the submenu interaction to be more accessible. It is now also WCAG compliant in the way that focus is managed.
8/14/2021
Section titled 8/14/2021- Redesigned the overall layout. This was really important, because the way that the compound grid was layed out initially meant a overall decrease in available space for the main content. This meant a lot of nested
orientation: landscape;
mediaqueries and a lot of repetitive code. I decided to pull the plug and switched to a more centered layout on desktop. With this, I did some visual tweaks everywhere to tied it all together.
8/8/2021
Section titled 8/8/2021- Added "Case Studies", listing some projects that are intended to give more insight into the visual work that was done
- Changed Some Urls and softly redesigned the navigation, including a very it'll-do-type-of dropdown-menu (that leaves desire for improvement)
7/29/2021
Section titled 7/29/2021- New redesigned Work-Experience pages!
6/21/2021
Section titled 6/21/2021- add syntax-highlighting
6/19/2021
Section titled 6/19/2021- add interrupting sections of content to some timeline events,
.intermezzo
, as nunjucks macros - add work-domain patterns to represent ux, design, frontend, backend & brand to be used in presentational "work-diagrams" (first as images, then as svg). They're accent-color-override sensitive!
- remove the arrow-icons from the main-navigation and place the main-navigation more accurately on the main grid
- add a fix for the
.ico
favicon file; Sometimes, the mime-type isn't correct - Replace the websites main
<h1>
with "hello, yes." Instead of "Thomas M. Semmler". Need to test how this affects/works - add some missing
:hover
styles.
6/10/2021
Section titled 6/10/2021- added the "work" page. This page displays a sort of timeline of my professional experiences.
- try preloading some fonts again, as lighthouse wanted me to do it lol. This is never gonna end, is it?
- all kinds of smaller color-contrast corrections to make the website more accessible
- add accent-color-override sensitive favicons
6/9/2021
Section titled 6/9/2021- improved font-loading, by utilising a service-worker
sw.js
, with help from Chris Ferdinandi. - some files were renamed to be a bit more consistent and self-documenting.
- implement a page for listing the 10 most recent blog posts and an archive list, that lists all posts.
- add some new filters to eleventy:
console
in order to debug collections (as thedump
filter seems to not work for this),dateReadable
, to format the blog post dates to a readable date. - tweak how the headlines' URL fragments are displayed.
- add the
eleventy-plugin-nesting-toc
by Jordan Shurmer plugin to automatically generate table of contents - allow the table of contents to highlight whatever current headlined section is in view which... kinda works. This needs some tweaking in the future.
- add a new template for blog post single views.
- add some global
meta
data to make this easier accessible throughout the website. - add an h-card.
- all kinds of minor and bigger changes to the CSS.
First Version Priorities
Section titled First Version PrioritiesHere is a bit of a summary of the things that were important to me for the initial, first version of the site:
- All markdown-rendered headlines have anchor links. They are being generated by the markdown-it-anchor plugin - enhanced with code from Nicolas Hoizey, based on suggestions researched by Amber Wilson.
- I wanted to reduce JavaScript as much as possible use it only to progresively enhance. So the
:target
-selector in combination with url-fragments is being utilized to show the mobile flyout-menu and the color-settings on larger screens. I have not made this before - if you discover an issue, please let me know! - Providing a skip-to-content link. While researching on what knowledgable people that I look up to have to say about this topic, I also remembered reading that one of the WCAG suggested techniques for the corresponding success criteria (2.4.1, Bypass Blocks) suggested adding links to multiple parts of the website. I never had the opportunity to implement that, so now was the time. I'm curious to find out if there is any response to this.
- Get it out as quickly as possible. I new that I didn't want to wait until I had all the content and design for everything done. I just wanted to be a little bit ahead with it, so that I could pick up development work whenever. But I also needed it to find a new job, so I decided that it needs to go live with the two pages most important for that (Hiring & About) and the imprint.