Some changes and an outlook on future additions
What’s new
New Feature Icons
Face it, I’m no designer (for sure you realized that already long ago). Anyway, at some point I really got fed up with the old feature icons and decided it was time for a change. So the next question was fundamentally, which way to go. Probably just use (Latin, Greek or Japanese) letters, use simplified, icon- or rather pictogram-style graphics or something completely different?
After scrolling through an ancient encyclopedia (early 19th century) and also a book about Galileo Galilei I got more and more impressed by the illustrations in these books and I decided to give some retro-style feature icons a chance.
Background
The original background image for this page was a 1920 by 1280 JPEG styled to cover the whole screen without attachment. Basically a compromise with loading time in mind. Originally I thought that scaling the image with a post’s length was a good idea, but this soon turned out to be visually disappointing as some of the post grew really long and the background image blurred into a brownish something. Moreover, the necessary upscaling on high-resolution displays also clearly blurred the image, so something had to be done.
First, some experiments with JPEG compression should allow for a larger image without much deterioration of loading time. An interesting starting point is Google’s guetzli JPEG encoder. The guetzli developers claim they can reduce the image’s size by 30% without any quality loss. Some experiments, though without any thorough testing, seem to confirm the claim. The problem with guetzli is that it is more suited for high-quality images than for web images optimized for size and loading time. The developers' decision not to support progressive JPEGs (due to longer decoding times) clearly points in this direction.
So I ended up in a two stage encoding using guetzli first to improve compression w/ virtually no degradation and after a re-coding the resulting JPEG into a PNG the latter was used as the input for a libjpeg based progressive encoding w/ some visible quality loss, yet no noteworthy artifacts, ending up in a 24 bit color, 3456 by 2304 pixels progressive JPEG of about 850kB. Not that bad…
Finally two background images for different screen sizes are selected automatically via @media CSS selectors and the background image is now attached fixed, so that the foreground content scrolls over the image.
Fonts
Most of the headings prove to be too bold for several displays, especially on Windows desktops. Therefore the font weight was reduce to result in slimmer letters.
Colors
Some color (particularly Cyan for headings) removed to improve the overall visual impression.
URLs
To improve search engine conformity the time/date based URLs were replaced by title based well-formed ULRs generated by a small Python script, re-/encoding, Unicode characters, umlauts & ligatures, replacing whitespace with underscores, removing special characters and converting everything to lower case.
Paraphernalia
Some experiments with CSS text transformations (spot them?)
Future Plans
Social Media Integration via Shariff
As a future addition Shariff should provide buttons to share posts on social media without revealing any personal data.
Commenting System
Already announced at the very beginning of this site, an Isso based commenting system shall finally be established within the next months.
Automated Abstracts
Ok, that’s more a fun project than anything serious. Using PySummarization automated abstracts of posts will be generated and added to the respective posts. Looking forward to the results ๐ค ๐คฃ
