It's been a bit since I've written a new post here. However, when I'm not looking for consistent work or helping to perpetuate this wonderful gig economy that we've thrust upon ourselves, I'm usually working on the site. Either fixing bugs, sharpening up the frontend, looking for ways to make the code more efficient, or adding in features to replace obvious placeholders (for example, the recent work done on "art").

Something was very recently brought to my attention that fit all of the above. But before we get to that, let me give you a general primer as to how this site functions.

// How Shit Works Around Here

Simply put: The framework of this site is my design, and it was designed to be stupid simple. The URL dictates what page loads, and the script pulls from various text files, depending on what was called. If a page is called, the header, the menu, the footer, and the content of the page itself is pulled. If a post is called, only the post itself and the footer are pulled, and the script will render the post's paragraphs automatically based on line breaks.

No databases, mostly text, and very little JavaScript. There's no unnecessary bloat to bottleneck the site from executing its core function: Publishing the God damn website. Hell, I'd take out the CSS if I could, but I want the site to look nice.

The lack of bloat also helps to keep hosting costs down. As of writing, the entire site (that is, scripts and content) clocks in at 37MB.

You might be asking, why bother doing all of that work? If you couldn't tell by the cheeky little timestamp at the bottom of the front page, it's not the first time I've been asked that:

"Why not use Jekyll?"
"Why not use 11ty?"
"Why not just use WordPress?"

Because this is the direction I want to take. And I'm very stubborn, so if I can do it, I'm going to do it. This is how I've made my sites for almost two decades, and while my knowledge base has expanded over the years, my web design philosophy and practice has stayed the same.

Case in point: This website I designed back in 2015.

That's not to say I have anything against those other services or the people who use them, they're just not for me. I'd rather go bespoke. That's the same kinda attitude I took to mocking up a custom RSS feed generator, and well...

There were issues.

// HV-RSS-GEN v1 Worked... Kinda

Of course, with new posts being added, it would make sense to have an RSS feed that cataloged said posts. I took the code that's used to catalog all of the posts to the front page and adapted it to generate an XML feed that can be recognized by an RSS reader. In my testing, the design worked, so that was good enough for me to deploy it live.

Problem was, I had no real experience with XML and I don't regularly use RSS readers, so my experience with the feed wasn't going to be indicative of the average use case. Given that each XML entry had a host of metadata, I set the generator to only pull the first paragraph of a post as a preview, because it was my understanding that RSS readers fetched the full post when the feed was accessed, or just opened the post from the website.

Of course, I was mistaken.

I got an email from a reader who seemed confused as to why posts were cut off so soon. At first, I didn't know what they were talking about, until I actually used an RSS reader. I quickly realized that my design was inadequate when it came to universal accessibility. And that's really the name of the game, right? You don't want to broadcast incomplete data; you want to send out a full, clear, unobstructed signal. So, I did what I really should have done the first time, and did some research.

I'm actually glad this was pointed out to me because I really wasn't in love with the first implementation anyway. Sure, it worked, but it would have definitely needed an overhaul in the future. I decided that future was now. I set it up to render full HTML posts (text formatting and images; no YouTube embeds) per XML entry, the script generates an XML file, which is rendered in full by accessing the old URL so that there are no broken links. I'm much happier with the result: It's cleaner, the output looks good in RSS readers, and it widens accessibility, allowing people to read my nonsense from any device or service they wish to use.

It also made me realize why people functionally use RSS readers in the first place. Talk about convenience.

// What's Next?

I would say between this and lacing the post framework with Microformats to make the site IndieWeb compatible, accessibility is in the bag. Next possible steps would be categories and Webmentions integration. Of course, despite being functional, this site is a work in progress; most are, after all. There will always be something to add, something to remove, modifications to make things more efficient. If fixing the RSS feed taught me anything, it’s that “good enough” is really just good enough, until someone actually tries to use it.

The work is not done...

The work is never done...

Thank you to the reader who contacted me and pretty much made all this happen. I'm always open to feedback, so if you have any ideas or notice something is off (and not in the "What is going on in that funny little head of yours" way), contact me at HisVirusness@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading. Stay tuned for more bullshit.