In case it’s not apparent from some of the other posts, I’m listening to a lot of podcasts right now. A series which I’ve especially enjoyed is Kaizen on Changelog & Friends with Gerhard Lazu. Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning “change for better” and in that vain it’s about continuous improvement.

Sometimes (most of the time), I find it hard to write something so instead I turn to lower hanging fruit like fiddling with my website to learn more about different aspects of web development. Maybe this will give me something to write about! At the very least it would be nice to have a log of my improvements so that I can look back at some point and (hopefully) see how far I’ve come.

The initial idea is to do this monthly but no plan survives contact with the enemy so we’ll uncover the real cadence as we go along, perhaps I’ll fall back to quarterly as the initial excitement wears off.

PostHog Analytics

As much fun as screaming into the void is, it’s also nice to know if anyone’s listening to the tree falling in the forest. My aim here was to just get a general sense of how many visits this site is getting.

Smooth scroll

Pretty easy tweak! Just needed to add scroll-behavior: smooth to the :root CSS selector for the project. Took slightly longer than a one-line change normally should because I first tried adding the property to the html and then body selectors but it turns out that if you apply it to those tags it doesn’t actually propagate to the viewport itself and because scrolling is handled at the viewport level it wasn’t taking effect.

Footnotes

Just did a little bit of tidy up to improve the spacing around the footnotes - both a bit of padding on the superscript element to prevent it clipping with the text and also adding some more spacing between the different notes in the footer.

External links

Went down a rabbit whole of adding a rehype plugin to add an icon to all the external links but eventually decided against it for a few reasons:

• Sticking to the defaults is likely the best behaviour
• Browsers have a back button, you can just use it if you don’t like the fact that you’ve gone elsewhere
• You’re not going to be losing any work on my site so there’s no danger inherent in external links
• I learned that gov.uk devs had this same discussion and eventually decided against it - they have a lot more data than I do so I’m happy to run with it