Part 27: CSS and Social Tags

Project Scope and ToDos

1. Static Site Generator that can build the blog and let me host it on Github Pages
2. I want to write posts in Markdown because I'm lazy, it's easy, and it is how I take notes now.
3. I don't want to spend a ton of time doing design work. I'm doing complicated designs for other projects, so I want to pull a theme I like that I can rely on someone else to keep up.
4. Once it gets going, I want template changes to be easy.
5. It should be as easy as Jekyll, so I need to be able to build it using GitHub Actions, where I can just commit a template change or Markdown file and away it goes. If I can't figure this out than fk it, just use Jekyll.
6. I require it to be used by a significant percent of my professional peers so I can get easy answers when something goes wrong.
7. I want source maps. This is a dev log site which means whatever I do with it should be easy for other developers to read.

• Also the sitemap plugin looks cool. Should grab that later.

• So does the reading time one.

• Also this TOC plugin mby?

• Use Data Deep Merge in this blog.

• Decide if I want to render the CSS fancier than just a base file and do per-template splitting.

• How do I cachebreak files on the basis of new build events? Datetime? site.github.build_revision is how Jekyll accomplishes this, but is there a way to push that into the build process for Eleventy?

• Make link text look less shitty. It looks like it is a whole, lighter, font.

• Code blocks do not have good syntax highlighting. I want good syntax highlighting.

• Build a Markdown-it plugin to take my typing shortcuts [prob, b/c, ...?] and expand them on build.

• See if we can start Markdown's interpretation of H tags to start at 2, since H1 is always pulled from the page title metadata. If it isn't easy, I just have to change my pattern of writing in the MD documents.

• Should I explore some shortcodes?

• Order projects listing by last posted blog in that project

• Limit the output of home page post lists to a specific number of posts

• Show the latest post below the site intro on the homepage.

• Tags pages with Pagination

• Posts should be able to support a preview header image that can also be shown on post lists.

• Create a Markdown-It plugin that reads the project's repo URL off the folder data file and renders commit messages with links to the referenced commit. (Is this even possible?) (Is there a way to do it with eleventy instead?)

• Create Next Day/Previous Day links on each post / Next/Previous post on post templates from projects

• Tags should be in the sidebar of articles and link to tag pages

• Create a skiplink for the todo section (or would this be better served with the ToC plugin?) - Yes it would be!

• Add a Things I Learned section to the project pages that are the things I learned from that specific project.

• Add a technical reading log to the homepage

• Hide empty sections.

• Add byline to post pages

• Have table of contents attach to sidebar bottom on mobile

• Support dark mode

• Social Icons

• SEO/Social/JSON-LD HEAD data

Day 27

Footer size

I want to add a link to the repo for the blog. Hmm, the footer's small element is getting its style overwritten. I'll decrease the size, but it looks like the line-height isn't applying the way I'd like. Didn't this happen before? Oh yeah, on Day 22. It had something to do with the display type in the CSS right? Yup. Ok, so let's just switch to display: block.

Social Icons

Ok, let's create some social icons! I've pulled down some of the icons I want to use in SVG format and to create clear reusable modules here I've given each social icon its own NJK file and creating a social-block NJK file.

Good stuff, now I just have to size and align the social media icon containers, that will size the SVGs inside.

I'll use text-align: center on the containing block to get the icons centered underneath my byline on the homepage.

• Social Icons

git commit -am "Fix footer and set homepage social icons"

Social/SEO Block

Ok, let's set up some social header data. Let's refer back to my post on social meta tags for Jekyll, as I suspect it will be useful to reuse here.

First I'll set up a partial file social-header.njk. Like with my Jekyll site I have a site object that contains basic information I can keep in the mix as a default.

I'll need to add a description to my site object, but that's easy enough.

Oh and I need to have my og:url work without an extra trailing slash, so I'll add an if statement - {%raw %}{{site.site_url}}{% if page.url %}/{{ page.url }}{% endif %}{% endraw %}

Huh... I still have a trailing slash.

Oh interesting, the homepage page.url is just / so I don't need an if statement I guess?

Yup, that works!

But I don't have a truncate function here, so I'll have to make my own filter to handle truncating a string.

Oh wait, no, there is a preexisting filter.

Ok the filters I was using in Jekyll don't port over exactly. It looks like I can replace strip_html | strip_newlines with | striptags(false).

Apparently I can't put line breaks into the templates the same way I can with Jekyll, so I'll have to collapse the various line-breaks and make it slightly less readable.

Ok, easy enough, I got everything figured out. Let's get the rest of the tags in.

Oh, right, I can't use excerpt, I'm using the more... uhh... descriptive 'description' property. Let's switch that. And I can't forget to strip out page. for individual posts.

Hmmm... no built-in last-modified, so I guess I'll handle it the same way, it will be in place when I manually add it to the post metadata, otherwise it will get skipped.

I'll switch my section to be the project property in my posts. Cool, make sure to add an if check and we're good there.

The rest of my old post deals with featured images, which I haven't figured out yet, so I figure I'll handle that next time.

git commit -am "Set up initial social sharing tags"