/blog

Hello April, where did you sneak up from?

A quarter of the year passed already. How time flies! Between struggling to finish the writing project, being head-down in code for the blog and longing to get back out to the moors, March seemed to disappear in a flash. April will probably be more of the same.

I fired off a couple of emails about possible new roles with my employer yesterday. I've been doing some self-guided study for a while with a view to working in a particular area but these other roles are completely unrelated. Nothing may come of it but you have to put yourself out there. 😉

The admin page continues to develop, when you make changes it now summarises what's been done:

I just felt there needed to be some indication that your changes have applied correctly, just returning to the list of options didn't feel right.

As mentioned last night I'm testing the site in reverse-chron order for a while just to ensure everything works as expected.

Something else I'm toying with is having the option to show post meta when posts are displayed in reverse-chron order.

When you are reading down the page in chronological order there is no real need to display details, the posts just follow one after the other. When going up the page, however, an additional indication that this is more like a traditional blog might be a good option. It is a question of choice and set via admin.

One thing I'm definitely NOT looking forward to is providing the option for date formats. At present everything is hard-coded for UK dates (dd/mm/yyyy) and I'd at least like to offer the US format (mm/dd/yyyy) but that will be a major undertaking.

I was just about to say I could take an easy or complex route with the date formats but Jan-Lukas mentioned the ISO date format: YYYY-MM-DD.

I already have URLs and navigation links in this format so don't actually need to change them. All I need to do is change the visible dates on the page (the main day reference and post meta) – and I've already done this and added the option to the admin page.

Thanks 🙏 that saved me a lot of work.

Testing is complete so we're back to the normal post order.

I need to stop – the admin page is in danger of becoming too busy. I've now added options for the theme colour (the grey banners at the top and bottom) and the title/footer links colour. You set the title colour and the footer links colour is derived from that with an offset.

I don't know if I'm going to keep that the way it is, remove or re-work it.