001 yet another blog site woo

I was wondering which theme I should start with for this blog. There are only 12 themes as of today, but figured i should at least do a speedtest of the default "tailwind" theme first.

Much wow. Very nice. Looks good to me so I suppose the next step is to customize it a little.

So much better performance than the theme i went with for another blog a few years ago.

2025.09.09 04:42:01 PM

• style.css variable/responsive/adaptive/fluid font sizing implimented
• heading elements stripped of tailwind classes in the template folder's php files
• so far blog contents lgtm but still issues elsewhere...

CSS pow() is such a godsend. I used to have some complicated looking CSS to achieve what i wanted even though i was able to simplify it over time it was never as minimal as using pow().

2025.09.09 09:02:19 PM

It's amazing how much time I can lose figuring out a new system (HTMLy i've used before but not tailwind) and making changes that would probably make the original tailwind theme designer want to scream that i'm doing something the wrong way ;)

And I'm still not done.

2025.09.11 12:40:51 PM

I have it mostly looking more like i want and haven't hurt the pagespeed scores too much yet. By testing a post page i found that link targets were too small for tags and other things below the post content and the author's profile pic was missing alt text. The page loading timeline still looks awful but not because i added additional css/script requests to pages - it was actually pretty bad with little to no content the first time I tested as well.

Speaking of the tags, the "tag cloud" links specifically, the backend of this CMS give them inline font-sizes using PT (a point in typography is defined as 1/72 of an inch or approximately 0.3527 mm) units and I really don't like that! Don't get me wrong, the script itself is a pretty clever way of doing it as far as variable font sizes for the different tags in a cloud, but points are a unit of measurement for printed media, not the web. So I found a way to fix it - chatjiminy gave me some JS that will find the links, remove the inline font-size, and give each link a class based on the point sizes they had.

document.querySelectorAll(".tag-cloud-link").forEach(el => {
    let size = parseFloat(el.style.fontSize); // get the numeric pt value
    if (isNaN(size)) return;

    // bucket into 4 classes
    let level;
    if (size < 11) level = 1;
    else if (size < 14) level = 2;
    else if (size < 18) level = 3;
    else level = 4;

    el.classList.add(`tag-size-${level}`);
    el.style.fontSize = ""; // remove inline font-size
});

The code insertion of the post editor supports makrdown code with a way to specify the code language out of the box so that's nice... now I'm gonna wanna make it prettier.

The image management of the CMS is really lackluster. Would also be nice if it had drag and drop functionality to upload images/files for a post.

2025.09.11 02:14:30 PM

Code pretty now via prism.js.

and the page speed impact is pretty negligible.

2025.09.15 01:12:25 PM

yellowlab.tools is another great testing/benchmark tool to help find any glaring issues with a web page. The only red item for this blog right now is 3 "CSS syntax error" (this item can be erroneous in my experience) in the tailwind.css file that really isn't worth my time to look at that file considering the context. I looked anyway and this is one indeed erroneous.

I'm a little sad I won't make it into the 14kb club with my current weight of over 247kb but that's wholly unsurprising.

This website over here is hosted on a disposable vape and the page is under 14kb tho... neat!