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

grunt work

  • Add screenshots of channels to Favourite Arena Channels
  • Figure out how to archive my Twitter Bookmark page
  • Add a /wayback page that contains a searchable list of archived versions of pages (and PDFs) I link to

writing

design

  • Add a print stylesheet
  • Add a “download as epub” link for my full site
  • Add site footer (?) implemented as “site/quote/link of the day”

October 2026

Published

  • Me page consolidates the Software I Use, Starterpack, Things I Do To Procrastinate and Uses pages into one long page

Updated

  • “Functionality” section added to the Colophon page

Design

  • Websites, Pedagogy, Epistemics and Personal were removed as topics from the Evergreen page
  • Double tap replaces the two finger tap to open search on mobile
  • Pressing 1–6 now opens corresponding links in the site navigation
  • [ and ] jumps between major headings on a page
  • Dark theme and font switcher use . and , as shortcuts
  • Search panel opens on pressing /, or on typing any letters
  • Search panel will open links in a new tab if ⌘ + Enter is pressed
  • Search panel shows “RIFF” and “WORKNOTE” labels next to pages from those sections
  • Backlinks open at the exact link in the source page that created the backlink
  • Collapsible elements redesigned to look more clickable and “block”-y

Plumbing

  • More HTML metadata added as JSON-LD, article:published_time, etc.
  • All pages now have a skip link
  • Analytics use Vigil isntead of Counterscale
  • My collapsible.html Hugo shortcode is replaced by a custom callout blockquote and render hook instead

September 2026

Published

Updated

  • Home page intro directly communicate what I’m about
  • 5 new ideas added to the Workbench page
  • More albums added to the Starterpack
  • Colophon contains a demo of all typographic elements
  • Writing page renamed to “Evergreen”

Design

  • External links have only underlines, and internal ones have only background color to clearly distinguish them from each other

  • Writing page re-designed to ve prose-driven instead of plain lists

  • Went back to background color to style blockquotes

  • Links in the nav bar are highlighted so you know where you are in the site’s taxonomy of pages

  • Each type of content page has special <h1> typography:

    • Root pages (large + uppercase + bold default font)
    • Worknotes (medium + uppercase mono font)
    • Riffs (small + bold default font)
    • Essays (large default font)
    • Notes (medium + bold default font)

  • Bullet styling uses “–” as a marker instead of the default disc

  • Citations are formatted as Author, [Source Document](URL) instead of [Author](URL), Source Document to emphasise that the document is what’s being linked to

Plumbing

  • Gigantic audit to fix small layout inconsistencies and accessibility issues
  • All <details> elements preserve their open/close state across page reloads
  • <img> tags had dimensions added to them to prevent loading jank
  • Links have title attributes containing the name of the page they link to
  • XML pages like my RSS feed and Sitemap are now styled with XLST

August 2026

Published

Updated

Design

  • Search panel opens with a two-finger tap on mobile
  • Page titles using the “bounce” variable axis on Shantell Sans to add a more roughshod style
  • Comic Mono replaces PT Mono as the monospace font
  • <no-wrap> custom element added for phrases that shouldn’t break across lines
  • Custom style added for <kbd> elements
  • Serif and monospace font options removed from font switche, only Figtree and Shantell Sans left
  • .excerpt styling for blockquotes is deprecated
  • <blockquote> element styled with just a border (to maintain the “colored background is a link” rule across the site)

Plumbing

  • Site deploys ~2x faster using a custom script instead of netlify-cli
  • Font subsetted more aggressively, making them 64% smaller
  • Accessibility audit
  • Inline styles cleaned up (~14kb of savings across the full site)
  • Gwern Mistakes page moved to /static archival

July 2026

  • Announced joodaloop.com v4.6!
  • Published My Twitter Threads collection
  • Images that fail to load have a custom fallback style
  • Switching blue theme color to a lighter shade to make dark mode more readable
  • New design (using collapsible sections) for the essays section on the Writing page
  • Writing page split into Essays and Notes & Lists in preparation for importing Substack posts
  • New structure for the “Stuff” section on the home page to better highlight individual projects

June 2026

  • Images have a max-height to ensure that no image takes up the full screen

May 2026

  • Dark mode follow OS preference by default
  • <blockquote> element is uses just a simple indent for styling
  • Analytics added using Counterscale

April 2026

Updated

  • More apps added to Software I Use
  • Workbench page rewritten to contain “frames, focuses & frontiers”

Design

  • A Service Worker caches the full site for offline and instant navigation
  • Search panel (⌘ + K) added for fast page search (title-only)
  • Backlinks added to sidebar on all posts
  • <details> element with custom styling, because I finally needed one (on the Workbench page)
  • Invitation to email me added to the end of all posts (including in the RSS feed)
  • “Latest” and “Favourites” sections removed from the Writing page

Plumbing

  • Added a linter for spelling errors, broken link formatting, missing metadata

March 2026

  • ~~~ published as a new nanoblog page

February 2026

  • Published Databases notebook
  • Add essays currently hosted on Substack to the Writing page

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

  • Switched to a 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 (and plans for changes) — that joodaloop.com experiences.

Published