Welcome to Work in Progress, the post series in which I’ll announce new site features, as well as spoil whatever it is I’m working on at the moment.

In this first issue we have a lot of highlights, in varying degrees of “sounding like a joke”. I hope you like them :)

I wanna see something cool

All in all, the Unsplash integration didn’t cause that much of a headache. Their TS implementation was helpful.

In order to prevent breaking the request quotas (as well as preventing constantly changing the hotlinks¹), I had to implement a local cache that can easily be reused in other sites and/or SSGs².

As a bonus I learned about a very interesting image placeholder technique known as BlurHash (I didn’t say I implemented it :p)

RSS Feed

I still have not implemented automatic social media posts when a new post is published. Instead I’ve developed a RSS feed, which you can use to keep up with my incessant posts.

To be honest, the implementation of this feature was entirely motivated by the recent Reddit protests, which forced me to find new ways to consume media. I liked it.

This link serves as a good starting point if you’re interested.

And more

• Commit hash on footer: have you ever doubted your commits were deployed to your preferred environment? Solving this issue is simple really: just add the current commit hash³ anywhere on your page!
• SEO: a feature that went pretty much ignored for much of my professional carrer suddenly turned into an essential one. Astro SEO helped me with defining meta tags, while structured data hopefully will allow my page to be correctly indexed and shown by search engines
• External links now have an icon automatically added so you can reconsider exiting my website
• 404 page: an pawsome feature, I’m sure you’ll like it 😌

Sneak peek

I’m obviously working on other things, but keep in mind that some of these may never see the light of day:

• Architecture overview: this post will be done soon, I hope
• Interactive meme: a small project that came to me in a dream, still in planning
• Feedback: a comment section? Post reactions? Linking directly to my personal WhatsApp? I’m looking for sustainable ways to accept feedback
• that’s it for now, structural changes take a long time 😫

As a final note, I’m still looking for the correct tone for this blog. Some of my planned posts will not be technical at all, consider yourselves warned.

o/

Footnotes