Changelog for joodaloop.com

I tinker with this site too much. To be fair, that is the price you pay for having a personal website, it is by nature an eternal distraction (or, more kindly, a worrystone) and a garden to tend to. You don’t get to make something like gwern.net without living a Gwern-like life. However many hours you think went into it, it was probably more.

This page is an homage to the hours lost to mine. Read the Colophon page if you want to know more about what the site is made of.

TODO

content

  • Start adding TILs to /~
  • Write all Worknotes for current interests
    • A Better Forum
  • Add an “unoffice hours” page
  • Add a Screenshots page
  • Edit Canvas UIs and Interface Anxiety essays
  • Update my FAQ page (tweet for questions)
  • Finish writing all the drafted Riffs

grunt work

  • Self-host the PDFs on the PDFs page
  • Update the Starterpack page
  • Figure out how to archive my Twitter Bookmarks page.
  • Add fallback links using archived copies

bones

  • Use actual heading elements for section and box titles
  • Add a “download as epub” link for my full site
  • Add a print stylesheet
  • Add multiplayers cursors (gauntlets) with Partykit
  • Add site footer (?)
    • blogroll implemented as “Site/quote/link of the day” in footer
  • Live site-wide chatroom (?)
  • bibliography page with a list of all links leading out of my site
  • Image dimensions are looked up at compilation time & inserted into <img> tags as browser hints
  • Subtle spotlight in dark mode
  • Icon/alt styling for external links
  • Add shared whiteboard (?)
  • Hovercards for internal links?

DONE

September 2026

  • Added riff on Better living through respecting chemistry
  • Changed citation style from [Author](URL), Source Document to Author, [Source Document](URL) to emphasise that the document is what’s being linked to
  • Added worknote for A Better Journal
  • Changed bullet styling to use “–” as a marker instead of the default disc
  • Home page now lists out the all the pages that were updated or added recently, instead of the notes-only list that was on the Writing page.
  • Added more albums to Starterpack
  • Published the SSSync worknote
  • Added title attributes to links, containing the name of the page they link to
  • Added XLST-based styling of my RSS feed
  • Added a demo of all typographic elements to the Colophon
  • Add styled sitemap.xml

August 2026

  • Started using the “bounce” variable axis on Shantell Sans to make page titles render in a more roughshod manner
  • Switched the site’s monospace font from PT Mono to Comic Mono
  • Replaced Netlify’s CLI package with a custom script that’s 2x faster
  • Add a custom element called <no-wrap> for prose phrases
  • Started using <kbd> elements to format keyboard shortcuts
  • Subsetted my fonts more aggressively, making them 64% smaller
  • Got rid of the serif and monospace font options, only switch between Figtree and Shantell Sans
  • Ran an accessibility audit of this site, resulting in some HTML rewriting
  • Rewrote the Colophon page to be terser
  • Added monthly canvases recap to My Inventions
  • Cleaned up inline styles to reduce site size by ~14kb
  • Moved the Gwern Mistakes page to /static archival
  • Made the search panel usable on mobile through a two-finger tap
  • Added riff to announce buy.joodaloop.com
  • Announced Worknotes as a new format, and published out.joodaloop.com and in.joodaloop.com as the first ones
  • Added the My Favourite Are.na Channels page
  • Removed the .excerpt class for blockquote
  • Changed styling of the <blockquote> element (to maintain the “colored background is a link” rule across the site)

July 2026

  • Improved the code for the Service Worker cache
  • Added fallback styling for images that failed to load
  • Made dark mode more readable by switching blue theme color to a lighter shade
  • Bumped up font size to improve readability (then bumped it back down)
  • Moved ideas in Workbench page into Markdown files
  • New design (using collapsible sections) for the essays section on the Writing page
  • Split my writing into Essays and Notes & Lists in preparation for importing Substack posts
  • Changed styling of “Stuff” on home page to better highlight individual projects

June 2026

  • New image styling that preserves aspect ratio while setting a max-height for tall ones.

May 2026

  • Made dark mode follow OS preference by default
  • Brought back analytics using Counterscale
  • Deployed a redesign of the <blockquote> element

April 2026

  • Added a linter for spelling errors, broken link formatting, missing metadata
  • Added a “Backlinks” section to content pages
  • Added ⌘ + K for fast page search (title-only)
  • Rewrote Workbench page to contain “frames, focuses & frontiers”
  • Designed a <details> element, because I finally needed one (on the Workbench page).
  • Added a Service Worker to cache the full site for offline and instant navigation.
  • Added invitation to email me to end of all posts (including in RSS feed)
  • Updated Software I Use
  • Redesigned Writing page to not need the Latest and Favourites sections

March 2026

  • Added new top-level page called ~~~

February 2026

  • Added Databases
  • Updated the design of the Writing page to include Essays currently hosted on Substack

January 2026

December 2025

November 2025

October 2025

  • Fixed RSS feed (hopefully)
  • Wrote new riffs
  • Refactored styling and typography
  • Switched to Hugo’s new template system

September 2025

August 2025

  • Updated Software I Use with current apps
  • Added dates to all published pages
  • Added more items to PDFs
  • Added more ideas to the Workbench page

July 2025

  • New three-column layout design for Writing page with topic-based sorting for all posts.
  • Replaced “Colophon” with “Changelog” in the home page heading links
  • Added RECOMMENDED tags to items in Software I Use


If you feel like commenting on this post, send me an e-mail at judah@joodaloop.com. I check all mail and respond within 2 days.

Info

Changes — in progress, planned, and imagined — that this site experiences.

Published
July 2025
Type
meta