Roadmap

This is a roadmap for the future of this site. I may never get to some of these ideas, but they were worth writing down. Things I’ve done are recorded at the changelog.

Let me know if you see a broken link or other unexpected behavior at hello@mattwidmann.net.

Content

New pages and content I’d like to add to the site.

• Add more photos and diagrams to notes.

• Add a bookshelf, showing covers, short reviews, and ratings of books I’ve read.

Bugs

Issues with the site.

• If a note with an inbound link doesn’t change, but a new inbound link is added, the incremental build system will not rebuild the linked-to note to reflect the new link. This means the tool has to rebuild all notes, every time it runs. A similar thing happens for indexes of entries, and is much more obvious when rebuilding the site. Any entries that didn’t change are rendered as placeholders in any index they appear in.

• Tables aren’t styled well.

• The Markdown source for notes and entries should be accessible by adding .txt to the directory name, instead of navigating to index.txt.

• Sidenotes and nearby code blocks interact poorly, leaving a gap in the text until the sidenote is complete. It would look better if the sidenote was broken up by the code block, but I don’t know how to do this with CSS.

• Loose lists are styled differently from tight lists because the embedded paragraphs have spacing in-between. Both of these Markdown list variations should render the same in the resulting HTML.

Features

Improvements that change how the site is written or viewed.

• Support a list of commonly-used reference-style links in Markdown to avoid needing to constantly repeat them like [Rust]: https://www.rust-lang.org.

Enhancements

Minor adjustments that make the site better, but aren’t fixing functional issues.

• Move the date to the side of note content.

• Add a post-processing step for SVG coming from SolveSpace.

• Allow an entry’s heading link to an arbitrary site, instead of the entry itself.

• Add excerpts for inbound links to notes.

• Add a tombstone to the end of each page.

• Support JSON feeds.

• Use a hierarchical numbering for nested ordered lists, like 1.2.3.

• Add a mailto link to the bottom of updates in the RSS feed.

Internal

Ideas that make it easier for me to work on the site, but don’t affect the HTML output.

• Remove notes from the output directory if they were removed from the source.

• Automatically validate the site before publishing:

  • Images should always be sized with alt text or conform to the correct aspect ratio.
  • Ensure each file is valid using W3C’s markup, CSS, or feed validation services.

• Support note links containing anchor references, like [Books I want to read#woodworking].

• Add integration tests.

• Support splitting notes across multiple files and concatenating them into a single web page.

• Automatically add the date updated to non-note pages.

• Place broken link errors at the bottom of the build output.

Experimental

Ideas for features that are low-priority.

• Make it easier to add a temporary banner to the site, as calls to action for contemporary causes, like registering to vote in the U.S. or donating to a charity in need.

• Consider switching from Netlify to sourcehut pages.

• Add a page that shows recent web traffic data to the site.

• Add color-coded tags to each note, to make it easier to see which section (e.g. plotting, making, garden, or reading) it’s from on the index.

• Add pre-generated mathematical equation typesetting with a tool like KaTeX.

• Add support for short updates interspersed with articles, like tweets but without Twitter.

• Add loading="lazy" to images so they’re only fetched when they would be visible on the page. On the other hand, this can frustrate people who want to load the entire page to read offline.

• Check prose for style problems and weasel words.

• Automatically compress source images when building the site.

• Add an email newsletter to make it easier for non-technical readers to follow updates.

• Set up global and per-page bibliographies that can be referenced from articles and notes.

• Store books and other referenced works as JSON5 CSL-JSON Data.

• Add metric conversions to any units found.

• Make an index of all the links on the site, like Jim Nielsen did in Indexing My Blog’s Links.

• Add a date to the footer for when the site was last updated.

• Consider additional distinct link suffixes for media, downloads, and mailto links.

• Optimize any images found, using ImageOptim or ImageAlpha.

Updated on 4 September 2022.

What’s already changed is in the changelog. Inspired by Dave Redfern’s roadmap.