The Tinkering Log

Sep 10 Photo pairs

The two-column photo mosaic on posts now catches photos the way Micro.blog’s uploader actually writes them, so a post with two or more photos tiles side by side on desktop, tablet, and an unfolded foldable instead of stacking two big photos. Phones still get one per row. (A matching two-up for the email newsletter was tried and pulled back the same day; the email template needs a different approach.)

Aug 31 Blaugust wrap-up + this very page

• Added the page you are reading right now: The Tinkering Log, a timeline of every logged theme work day since March, built as its own shortcode — with a link in the footer.
• New blaugust-stats shortcode on /blaugust/: a tile grid with posts, words, reading time, and averages, plus “Also filed under” category pills.
• Word counting mirrors The Pulse so the two pages can never disagree.

Aug 29 Home page, take two

• Home “Recent Geekouts” rebuilt as a ledger: a featured newest post with kicker and summary, the rest as rows with photos and read times, and every home section under a proper heading with a “more” link.
• The calendar tally moved beside the year picker and now counts distinct posting days; fixed the page leaking its loading text into social cards.

Aug 28 Single post redesign

• Titled posts got a priority category pill, a challenge count in the meta line, and a “Keep reading” older/newer pager in place of related posts.
• The post title now slides into the compact header on scroll, with reading time and progress percent.
• Sky toggle reworked into an always-visible three-state pill: Sky, Night, Day.

Aug 25 Milestone badge rescue

Restored the gold day-25 Blaugust badge after a theme re-sync ate the live-only edit — badge markup now lives safely in the challenge-mark partial.

Aug 23 The Pulse

• New self-updating stats page, The Pulse: hero post count, a nine-tile mosaic, month bars, and a ranked category map — with honest word-count rules.
• Archive blurbs and social descriptions finally decode HTML entities; 165 of them had a literal ’ showing.

Aug 22 Post calendar

• New post calendar page: a year-view calendar of every post with a year switcher and per-day panels.
• Squashed a sneaky Hugo bug where emoji titles quietly made posts vanish from the count.

Aug 21 Re-sync recovery

• Micro.blog’s theme re-sync turned out to be a full replace and wiped five live-only files — all recovered the same morning. GitHub is now the source of truth.
• New nav-icon partial ended the duplicate-icon bug; descender-free links get a snug optical underline; movie card links finally underline on hover.

Aug 19 Print support + social cards

• Full print stylesheet and a print button on posts, tuned with an 800-post page-fit audit.
• Social shares now get og:image support: the post’s first real photo, or a branded fallback card.
• New Word Nerd Alert band on the home page; standalone pages moved from the rail to the compact top nav.

Aug 18 Accessibility pass

• WCAG 2.1 AA color audit across all five skies: 803 contrast violations down to zero, with new text tokens and a night-flipping button pair.
• Newsletter echo cards now match the actual email, and the analytics script moved to explicit HTTPS.

Aug 17 Blaugust progress tracker

Bullet-journal-style tracker on /blaugust/ with 31 day squares that fill themselves in — dots instead of squares on phones.

Aug 16 Fingerspelling experiment + newsletter polish

• Experiment, never kept: built an ASL fingerspelling animation for the “Recent Geekouts” heading, iterated it all day, then pulled it the same day — the techniques are saved for another time.
• Newsletter preview hardened to be truly email-true, right down to Gmail’s blue links.

Aug 15 Badge tiers

Milestone tier badges (Blauginner through Rainbow) now stamp the Blaugust ticket at days 1, 5, 15, 25, and 31; fixed the cut-off badge row on phones.

Aug 13 Mentioned Elsewhere

• New “Mentioned Elsewhere” card on posts for links from around the web — webmention receiving was already wired up.
• Fixed wavy underlines clipping descenders in post bodies and hid the rail scrollbar.

Aug 12 Mobile header bug, solved for real

• Root-caused the recurring cut-off header on iOS: the script was measuring a scroll-collapsed header during URL-bar resizes.
• Fixed the rabbit mascot flickering after back-button navigation.

Aug 11 Challenge marks

Hand-drawn-style die-cut Blaugust ticket and a pressed #100DaysToOffload stamp, merged into one partial that counts challenge days at build time and restarts each year.

Aug 6 Button + underline fixes

Fixed the unreadable Discord button hover and some stubborn micro underline offsets.

Aug 5 Blog card ships

The 3D-offset blog card went live: navy border, offset shadow, terracotta on hover and at night.

Aug 3 Archive nav + footer fixes

• Fixed the archive nav never lighting up — turns out /archive/ thinks it is the home page.
• The footer copyright finally wraps on phones and foldables.
• Designed three blog-card variants for Perch links and picked the 3D offset.

Aug 2 Contact page + Blaugust page

• New contact page with a Letterbird form matched to the theme.
• The Blaugust page got a self-counting tally and constellation badges that swap in automatically as the month goes on.
• New shortcode pulls the OULDHH feed onto /now/ at build time.

Aug 1 Archive counts + post badges

• Post-count pills on archive year and month headings.
• Automatic “Post N of 31” badge on every Blaugust post.

Jul 31 The Bookmark

• New reading calendar, The Bookmark: month view with day popups, a reading-log toggle, and a goal meter with real book covers.
• /reading/ rebuilt with self-counting pills so the labels can never drift.
• The Queue got a small note explaining that dates are theatrical releases.

Jul 29 Connect & Share

• Single posts now end with a Connect & Share card: follow by Email, RSS, or JSON, and share to Micro.blog, Bluesky, or Mastodon (it remembers your instance).
• The rabbit mascot shipped — peeking at the Spotlight banner with a once-a-day “Hey!”.
• Newsletter pages now preview exactly like Gmail renders them; The Queue learned three more release-date formats.
• Micro posts’ links were invisible on the home page — fixed with the terracotta wavy underline.

Jul 28 Queue + Watched on phones

Fixed date collisions on small screens — grid columns now size to the widest text instead of the poster.

Jul 27 The Watched page

• New Watched page: every rated review with posters and star ratings, rebuilt straight from the posts.
• Category model settled once and for all; the Lora reading weight is now keyed to the sky, heavier by day and lighter at night.
• All the CSS sections renumbered 1 through 73.

Jul 26 3-D bookshelf + The Queue

• Bookshelf covers now stand on a rendered wooden plank in 3-D, with fluid cover sizing for foldables.
• New watchlist page, The Queue, grouping upcoming releases into Out now, months, and bare years.
• Set up a local Hugo test rig — it caught a build breaker on day one.

Jul 25 Covers everywhere + plug-in purge

• Book covers and movie posters now show in the home Bookshelf and Reel sections.
• Removed the Blogroll and FeedLand plug-ins: jQuery and Bootstrap gone, page requests down from 36 to 25.

Jul 24 Mascot sketches

• Designed the corner-greeter rabbit in mockups (Canva art, pop-in, speech bubble).
• Fixed single posts accidentally inheriting the rail sidebar.

Jul 22 The rail + Lora

• The big one: a desktop rail sidebar with avatar, nav, subscribe block, and sky toggle — and Lora became the reading font.
• Home page rebuilt around it: Spotlight, Recent Geekouts, Micros, The Bookshelf with live progress bars, Reel and Remote, and Browse by Category.
• Footer and Spotlight simplified to ride the sky instead of carrying their own colors.

Jul 19 Favicon

The favicon now follows the profile avatar automatically.

Jul 18 Gradient titles

Post titles now render a navy-to-terracotta gradient built from sky tokens, so it adapts to all five skies; excerpts got a soft tease fade.

Jul 16 Email-safe echoes

Attribution pill v2 for echoed posts: table-based and email-safe, with the squished-avatar bug fixed.

Jul 15 Sky toggle in the header

The sky toggle moved from a footer text link to a sun icon in the header, and night pages now paint dark from the very first frame.

Jul 14 Captions follow the sky

Social embed captions switched to theme tokens so they shift with the sky like everything else.

Jul 13 Night-proofing sweep

• Retired the banner post header for a plain title with a small terracotta accent rule.
• Swept the whole stylesheet for hardcoded colors that broke at night, and added a dropcap style.

Jul 12 The sky ships

• Sunrise/sunset theme went live: the whole site moves through five skies — day, dawn, sunset, dusk, night — on the reader’s clock, with a contrast guard and a sunset logo swap.
• Reworked the same day after a live readability problem: continuous color blending replaced with five fixed skies.
• Newsletters pinned to paper-day colors so they read like email even at night.

Jul 11 Home overhaul

• Spotlight marquee up top, the feed capped at six recent posts, and a “View the full archive” button instead of numbered pagination.
• Stationary back pill on mobile posts; microformats added for webmentions.
• Fixed the archive quietly stopping at April (a stale shadow template).
• The reply icon now stays anchored to the first line when a long link title wraps on mobile.

Jul 10 The logo

• The image logo replaced the text wordmark site-wide, tuned across every breakpoint.
• Closed up the gap between the new logo and the about strip.

Jul 9 Perch Mail

• Newsletter pages rebuilt as a two-panel email-client layout: issue list on one side, reader on the other.
• Header avatar with an idle bob, a warm terracotta featured marquee, a skip-to-content link, a real search form, and a keyboard-aware mobile tab bar.

Jul 8 Header gap fix

Chased a 40px phantom gap above newsletter cards to one stale variable living in three different places.

Jul 7 View transitions

• Cross-document view transitions shipped after a long flicker hunt — pages now slide instead of blinking.
• New replying-to block for reply posts with a dashed thread line; link preview cards remapped to theme tokens.
• Home avatar swapped to the orange-circle art with “Hi, I’m Toby”.

Jul 3 More like this

Related posts rewritten with multi-category scoring and a three-column card grid.

Jun 29 Light/dark mockup

Experiment, never implemented: a light/dark toggle mockup with a proposed dark token map. It was set aside, but it planted the seed for what later became the sky theme.

Jun 28 Fold tuning

Softened the post header terracotta, moved pills to navy, fixed Samsung Fold font sizing, and ran a full color audit.

Jun 27 Glass capsule header

• Experiment, removed later: the navy header morphed into a floating frosted-glass pill on scroll, with a progress bar and a shrinking logo — replaced down the road by the rail and compact header.
• Post headers redesigned as full-bleed terracotta banners (also retired later), and Bricolage Grotesque arrived for the logo.

Jun 26 Inter actually loads now

Fixed mobile-only bold paragraphs: the body font’s @font-face had no source, so it had never loaded at all.

Jun 24 Newsletter pages

• Newsletter list styled with numbered entries and a banner; new newsletter single template with prev/next.
• Fixed a site-breaking stray template tag that had been silently truncating the home page.

Jun 8 Rhythm + mosaics

Unified list styles and line-height across every content context, added a responsive photo mosaic for multi-image posts, and styled conversation replies as warm cards.

May 30 Reblog cards

Reblog quotes gained floating cover thumbnails and a new rounded card style with an attribution pill.

May 28 Threads + link cards

Drafted a Threads embed shortcode and designed the link preview card.

May 27 Card link underlines

Book and movie card links got their terracotta underlines back.

May 24 Blockquote glow-up

Blockquotes moved to a terracotta left border with a faint oversized decorative quote mark behind the text.

Apr 19 Bookshelf grid

Reading page shelves now fill cleanly on desktop, phones, and the Pixel Fold.

Apr 18 Reading + Now pages

• Reading page restyled with a CSS wood-grain shelf and covers-only rows; the Now page fully redesigned with the navy Tinkering card and OULDHH badge.
• Mobile dates collapse to an editorial style: big day number up top, content full width.

Apr 16 Embed shortcodes fixed

• The YouTube and Instagram shortcodes finally worked — the folder was named layout instead of layouts. One letter.
• YouTube got home-page thumbnails and Shorts support; Instagram got a proper embed with a newsletter fallback.

Apr 14 Keep reading

Related posts moved to multi-category overlap scoring with three buckets: best titled match, a couple of micros, and wildcards.

Apr 13 Sticky TOC mystery

• The table of contents refused to stick because a browser extension was silently killing position: sticky. Fixed with one override.
• The year joined the date stack on post cards.

Apr 11 One card to rule them all

Micro cards and post cards merged into a single unified card, carousel controls rebuilt, and a performance pass with font preloads and critical CSS.

Apr 6 Feed rescue

One post had a stray bit of HTML inside it that broke the layout of every card below it on the home page — added guard rules so a single bad post can never wreck the whole feed again.

Apr 5 Pill consistency

Category pills standardized above the content on both card types, and a paste accident that doubled the dates cleaned up.

Apr 3 The carousel

Experiment, removed later: the static featured banner became a Splide fade carousel pulling from long-form posts — retired when the home page was redesigned that summer.

Apr 2 Progress bar + TOC

Scroll progress bar added site-wide, and a table-of-contents sidebar built for long reads.

Mar 31 Blockquote consistency

Card blockquotes matched to the single-post treatment, and “Long Read” became “Long Posts”.

Mar 30 Excerpt fix

Feed excerpts stopped stripping HTML — summaries keep their formatting now.

Mar 29 Archive, categories, pagination

• Archive rewritten with year and month grouping; category pages rebuilt to match the home cards; homepage pagination and a search box added.
• Accessibility score jumped from 76 to 93.

Mar 28 Nav + landing page

• Subscribe joined the nav, a More dropdown appeared, and the desktop breakpoint was tuned for the Galaxy Z Fold 7.
• Home page rebuilt with an about strip, a subscribe strip, and a five-post feed.
• Single posts gained the Surprise Me button and related posts.

Mar 27 Where it all started

First logged session: page title alignment, theme-color meta, every category on the home page, and side-by-side prev/next on mobile.