For one, I updated the Colophon.
For another, I updated a jillion pages under the “Words” section. These had been static pages for, uh, 20 years. And finally I’ve imported those pages into the blog. It was relatively painless to do the import, but the old static pages were pretty quixotic, so customizing their unique look to 2021 development tools took a certain amount of time. For all the Words pages that I imported are using a new WordPress template, which is straightforward to add to my custom theme.
I don’t think anyone necessarily cares that I’ve modernized my ancient poetry and out-of-date technical articles, but it was fun for me. I quite like that these pages will now come up when people search the search box of the site. It’s also useful to “practice” my WordPress development and CSS development. I’m a bit late to the party but being able to use both Flexbox and Grid was pretty fun! I use SCSS to manage my CSS which is is easier to maintain than the prior hodge-podge of ad hoc multiple sheets.
There’s so much tooling for web development–it’s great! But I also see that there’s so much that it can be very daunting. Also, things change at a steady pace in web development. On the positive side, there are just as many learning resources: The MDN Docs are tremendous and reliable.
I also want to give a shoutout to phpStorm, which provides an incredible value for a relatively inexpensive price.
