Over the last month I’ve invested quite a number of hours into improving this blog.

Visible Changes

Main Blog

• New theme based on Simple.css.
• Designed with mobile usage in mind.
• More consistent image formatting.
• Better Open Graph meta tag support.

Books

I migrated all my books from Goodreads to a new dedicated page. Added a few neat features:

• Overall reading statistics using Charts.css, also used for statistics on recommendation pages.
• Filter by genre.
• Filter by 4 or 5 stars.
• Links to recommendation posts where available.
• Support abandoning of books.
• Cover images from Open Library.

Invisible Changes

I migrated from Jekyll to a homebrew static site generator. Read more about the technical details and justification in the README.

• Custom tags that can be used in markdown source files.
  • x-youtube to embed mobile responsive youtube videos.
  • x-spoiler to mark spoilers in book reviews.
  • x-reading-graphs to embed reading statistics for a year.

• A custom build script that supports fast incremental builds based on digests of dependencies. It also reports on time taken in a comprehensible way. Here is what a clean build looks like:

    Book Fragments: 655 in 641ms (1ms avg)
     Book Metadata: 655 in 201ms (0ms avg)
        Book Pages: 655 in 370ms (1ms avg)
       Directories: 9 in 0ms (0ms avg)
             Index: 3 in 76ms (25ms avg)
      Index (Book): 3 in 369ms (123ms avg)
    Post Fragments: 53 in 271ms (5ms avg)
     Post Metadata: 53 in 26ms (0ms avg)
        Post Pages: 53 in 72ms (1ms avg)
           Sources: 718 in 14ms (0ms avg)
      Static Files: 5 in 3ms (1ms avg)
        Synthetics: 1 in 212ms (212ms avg)
  
          Prebuild: 122ms
      Walking Tree: 255ms
             Tasks: 2256ms
          Overhead: 49ms
  
             Total: 2683ms
  

  Where as a no change incremental build looks like:

     Directories: 9 in 0ms (0ms avg)
         Sources: 718 in 12ms (0ms avg)
      Synthetics: 1 in 48ms (48ms avg)
  
        Prebuild: 115ms
    Walking Tree: 266ms
           Tasks: 61ms
        Overhead: 55ms
  
           Total: 497ms
  

• Ability to add arbitrary credits to a post, in addition to the header image credits.
• Test coverage that can run against both local and production instances.