I want this site to be under 256KB in size (with smaller goals wherever possible). The smaller a site is, the faster it loads. Whether that is 'in a reasonable amount of time' when you have (relatively) slow internet access or 'effectively instantly' when you measure your internet speed in Mbps. The main thing holding it back is images. Currently there are only 3, averaging around 30KB each but that is still the vast majority of the content of this site. The text portion of this website is very small - as is pretty typical of text data.
I'm still working out how best to do images - 1-bit black and white is great but doesn't work in all cases (this image is ruined by 1-bit greyscale) and isn't super accessible. The styling is also unfinished - an auto dark mode that doesn't use much CSS text would be great. This current version of the website is entirely hand-written HTML because frankly if I can write a dissertation in LaTeX then I can quite comfortably use a bit of HTML. However this does make some of the management a bit annoying. I'll probably switch it to a statically-built site using cat and make like I did with the last version of the site.
the font is totally custom, i made it myself:
its still missing a lot of stuff on it, i want to add the rest of the nordic letters. these ones are the only two that aren't used in swedish: æ and ø (if they dont look weird then i've done this). but in my music section i talk about pikekyss and svømmebasseng, both of which are norwegian. its also still missing a lot of punctuation at the time of writing.
at some point i'd like to write my own static site generator. although this makes it sound much more fancy than it is.
i basically just want to write a script that does a search through a folder heirarchy and runs sub scripts to build each page.
i have thought of lots of cool things i'd like to include that are very easy to script but hard to keep updated manually and my makefile system is getting very cumbersome these days.
one great example is the page file size at the bottom, its currently generated using du and cat and awk and stuff but that feels so sketchy and i think it would be so much easier with an ssg.
imagine being able to write something like insert_image(path, alt)
and it adds an html img tag plus add the file size of the image to the number at the bottom.
using object oriented (against my will) would make it easier to add extra custom stuff, and extra styling info could go at the top of each html file rather than having loads of one-off stuff in the global css file.
the blog is also completely broken at the moment, the makefile just concatenates them and i have no control over the order which is a problem.
bit of a stream of conciousness there but i'm excited to work on that now.