Part 29: Schema.org and Authorship

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 29

Ok, all the SEO/SEM stuff is good. It's been a while so let's knock out an easy one and add my byline to post pages.

I'll pull the byline header from the index page and turn it into a partial. But I don't want people to click off the site to my ID page like they are now. I should use the Microdata for the Person object to link my identity page on Github to my byline on this site.

Hopefully I'll get this right. It looks like way to handle it is with a container of itemprop with the Person type.

<h5 itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Person">

I want to keep the link to my ID and it looks like the way to do that is using a self-closing link tag.

<link itemprop="sameAs" href="http://aramzs.github.io/aramzs/" />

But if I want it to properly designate this as 'author' it can't stand on it's own. It'll need to be in a larger schema object. I guess that means giving my blog posts the Schema.org markup for a Creative Work. Might not be worth it but I wonder... can I have a block that is just properties for a tag?

Looks like yes:

{% raw %}
<body {% block bodytags %}{% endblock %}>
{% endraw %}

And then I can fill that in with:

{% raw %}
{% block bodytags %}itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/CreativeWork"{% endblock %}
{% endraw %}

End then I can add a little custom styling to make it smaller for the article context where it is less relevant. I'll move the style up to my user.sass file and then add a post specific rule to change the size.

Looks good and looks like it validates!

Ok, didn't have much time today, so just a short dip of the toe.

git commit -am "Set up byline on posts"