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Rob Weychert

V7: Structural challenges

The ambitous scope of the timeline section

Most of this redesign’s structural challenges pertain to the timeline section, previously described thusly:

  • Timeline: The blog on the current version of my site, V6, collects most of what I’ve written for public consumption since 2001 across nearly 40 different sources. I’d like to expand that to include even more sources and content types, collecting virtually everything I’ve shared online in one sprawling, sortable/filterable timeline.

Since the projects section is a higher priority and the new parts of the timeline may not even be included in the site’s initial launch, it’s tempting to just put the timeline on the back burner. But here’s the thing: the timeline’s structural challenges will inevitably introduce technical challenges, which will have a big influence on what tools I use to build the site. I want to pick the right tools the first time, and I’ll give myself a better chance of doing that by working out the specifics of the timeline concept now and trying to wrangle it into a good user experience that’s technically feasible.

However, I’m only willing to go to so much trouble to make the timeline a reality, so if it turns out that what I have in mind is too architecturally convoluted in terms of UX and/or execution, I’ll scale the concept back until I find the right compromise. But let’s start by thinking big.

My V6 blog currently contains 544 posts from 39 sources. That 544 number is a bit misleading, because a number of those posts are digests of many smaller posts. For example, I used to publish a haiku every weekday, and rather than make each haiku an individual post, I collected them in monthly digests. Similarly, film reviews I’ve written on Letterboxd that are fewer than 100 words are collected in annual “loose ends” posts. I did this mainly for two reasons:

  1. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of an entire webpage devoted to just a few words.
  2. It’s a static site made with Jekyll, which means more posts make for longer build times. (The site currently takes about 40 seconds to build, due to a variety of factors.)

The former doesn’t bother me so much anymore, but it does introduce design challenges. The latter is emblematic of the technical challenges that may lie ahead, especially considering that I’m trying to add a lot more content. Here are the biggest troublemakers:

Even if most of the content to be added is bite-sized, accounting for each of those bites is a big task: the number of individual posts on the site will grow more than 20 times. Compounding the technical complexity introduced by that sheer volume are issues of taxonomy and UI. Some of the many open questions:

  • How to handle the information architecture and URL structure? I kind of like the idea of keeping everything under /blog/, since this is a log of things I’ve done on the web, but “blog” has more specific connotations now. Maybe the aggregate of posts can be browsed under /timeline/ and individual posts can be categorized à la /blog/, /notes/, /images/, etc?
  • How to handle tweet replies and threads, especially ones that occur over extended time periods? Is there a good way to make a tweet an individual post but still acknowledge its context among other tweets, many of which are from other people?
  • Given the issue of build times, can this still be a static site? I really like being able to build my site from a local directory of text files, without relying on server-side software that abstracts the content away into a database and requires remote maintenance. But is that still a viable option for a site this big? If I need to switch to another kind of CMS, how much of a lift will data migration be?
  • For data sources that I’m still updating regularly, like Twitter and Letterboxd, can/should I syndicate them out from my site, presumably with the help of some IndieWeb technology? Or download my data from those services periodically and backfill? Will I be able to integrate multiple collections of downloaded JSON data with my existing blog posts?
  • How much metadata should I publish? On Letterboxd in particular, I have a fairly rich tagging system. Can/should I integrate that into my site? What relationship should it have with my site’s existing tag/topic system? Should incoming data without tags (like Twitter) somehow be retroactively tagged?
  • What the hell am I getting myself into??

Next up: sketches and research!

All posts in this series

V7: Introduction

Redesigning my site in public

Welcome to RobWeychert.com V7! There are a number of new things I want to try with my site, from structure to aesthetics to code, and so it’s time to begin a fresh redesign. Inspired by my friends Jonnie and Frank, I’ve decided to do it in public from the ground up. I’m starting with bare-bones HTML and as the design process unfolds, each step will be reflected on the site in real time and documented… See more →

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V7: The “viewport” meta tag

Apparently it is still necessary!

The first thing I did when setting up this new version of my site was to put together some minimum viable HTML templates. Here’s the blog post template:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title><!--POST TITLE--> | RobWeychert.com V7</title>
    <meta name="description" content="<!--POST DESCRIPTION-->" />
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RobWeychert.com V7" href="/index.rss"/>
  </head>

  <body>
    <… See more →
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V7: Content priorities

Making my projects more visible

I added a tiny bit of CSS to aid readability by keeping line lengths in check on larger viewports:

body {
  margin: 0 auto;
  max-width: 75ch;
  padding: 1rem;
}

When calling the CSS file from the page head, I include a query string based on today’s date, which I’ll update when the CSS is updated. This will let updates get past the browser’s cache.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/assets/css/main.css?20200108" />

Hopefully this small stylistic addition will keep things tidy enough until I properly begin the visual… See more →

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V7: Structural challenges

The ambitous scope of the timeline section

Most of this redesign’s structural challenges pertain to the timeline section, previously described thusly:

  • Timeline: The blog on the current version of my site, V6, collects most of what I’ve written for public consumption since 2001 across nearly 40 different sources. I’d like to expand that to include even more sources and content types, collecting virtually everything I’ve shared online in one sprawling, sortable/filterable timeline.

Since the projects section is a higher priority and the new… See more →

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V7: Timeline section inventory

Untangling the content

Progress on the redesign has slowed, partly because I’ve been busy with other things, and partly because, frankly, the open questions about the timeline section enumerated in my previous post are an intimidating mess, a perfect example of the early stages of the Design Squiggle.

In a fight or flight situation like this, here are the arguments for flight:

  • “Uh, the timeline isn’t even your top priority for the site, remember? What’s more important: working on… See more →
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V7: The timeline is taking shape

Making progress with sketches, wireframes, and a prototype

Though it’s mostly taken place in scattered, stolen moments, I’ve made a lot of progress on the UX of the timeline section, much of which was still a disconcerting mystery not so long ago.

With the help of the data categories and content inventory I established in the previous post, I’ve settled on a binary timeline concept: each post is either small or large. Small posts consist of up to 100 words and/or up to… See more →

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V7: On dependency

How I incorporate other people’s work into my own—and how I don’t

I might have expected quarantine life to be a boon to my site’s redesign process since most of my preferred social distractions were nullified. Instead, I’ve been using the time in isolation to make music videos, finalize a home purchase, move into said home, and try to find my place in our national reckoning on racism and public safety reform. But as I slowly shift some of my attention back to the redesign, I’ve been… See more →

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V7: Choosing a CMS

Do my new content requirements need a new content management system?

For awhile, I had basically resigned myself to the idea that the massive amount of stray content I’m planning to bring home (thousands of tweets, Flickr photos, etc) would necessitate moving my site onto a LAMP stack CMS. I started poking around in WordPress, which I hadn’t touched in years, and Craft, which I use regularly in my work at ProPublica. The former felt bloated and the latter’s setup presumed a level of back-end know-how… See more →

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V7: Beginning data migration

Prepping hundreds of tiny blog posts for republishing

Apropos of nothing, I decided that the first of the old entries I’d bring over to V7 would be granular ones:

  • Daily Haiku: A section of the fourth version of my site, beginning back in 2005. As the name suggests, I wrote a haiku every weekday based on the Dictionary.com Word of the Day. Each haiku was originally its own entry, but when I brought them over to V6 a few years ago, I consolidated… See more →
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V7: Renewed purpose

Goodbye, Twitter

It’s been nearly two years since I posted an update on this project! I’ve been moving it forward slowly and quietly since then, and I’ll share some details about those activities in due time, as well as details about how work and life changes have introduced new and different demands on my time and somewhat expanded the scope of the site. But for now, the most important takeaway is that my fundamental vision for V7… See more →

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V7: The Procrastination Destination

Working on my site instead of yours

I’ve given my V7 redesign project the unofficial tagline “The Procrastination Destination” since the significant progress it’s seen in the past few months has come mostly in stolen moments, some of which turned into extremely productive (and perhaps troublingly obsessive) deep dives. This recent movement has been pretty non-linear, and the tasks in play are all interdependent enough that none of them are really done until all of them are, but I seem to be… See more →

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V7: Eleventy it is

Switching static site generators

Every static site generator has idiosyncrasies, and Eleventy is no different. As is the case pretty much any time I try out software, I find that Eleventy often does things differently than I think it ought to, and it doesn’t always make itself as clear as I think it could. A couple of examples:

  • Eleventy has no built-in mechanism for date-based archives. A common blogging convention I’ve adhered to for many years involves organizing post… See more →
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V7: Expanding scope

Bringing more data and functionality into the mix

In my previous post, I mentioned Tinnitus Tracker, my standalone concert diary site which can be browsed by genre, artist, venue, city, state, and year. I had been planning to continue updating that site concurrently with V7, but it recently occurred to me that it makes a lot more sense to just consolidate the two sites, which in hindsight seems incredibly obvious.

For one thing, I’ve never been satisfied with the Tinnitus Tracker design, and… See more →

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V7: Metadata structure and sitemap

Solidifying the information architecture

I’ve been revising a metadata structure for blog posts and a sitemap for a few months now, and since I haven’t felt the need to tweak either of them in awhile, they’re probably solid enough to document here.

Metadata structure

The blog post metadata has been developed to accommodate a wide variety of post types, to give me a lot of flexibility in how to present them, and to give users a lot of options… See more →

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V7: The Great Data Migration

Bringing it all home

I’ve done a lot of work on the site in the last two months, and a launch date, while still a ways off, is finally coming into focus. I’ve been working on this redesign very intermittently for over four years now, but at this point I expect to keep at it until it’s done, with as little interruption as possible.

Among other recent advances, I’ve moved the site from Jekyll to Eleventy, chosen a font… See more →

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V7: The Great Data Migration, Part 2

Once more, with feeling

From the beginning, it was clear that data migration was going to be this redesign’s biggest, most cumbersome task, as the site was growing from 600-some blog posts to untold thousands. I assumed that reformatting the mountain of data arriving in disparate configurations from over a dozen external sources (as described in my previous post) would be the lion’s share of the work, and it would be smooth sailing from there. How wrong I was!… See more →

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V7: Launch day

Expanded site, new design, same me

I started redesigning this site in January of 2020. Remember January of 2020? We didn’t know we were living in the Before Times. There were still a few people in the White House who weren’t Fox News hosts or meme coin shills or raw milk evangelists. Our tech bro billionaires hadn’t yet entered the endgame of their persistent campaign to annihilate whatever sense of objective reality we once shared. We were so young.

I wouldn’t… See more →

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