Contact form removed - iameven.com
I've had the contact form at the bottom of all my posts for 3 years now and have received 0 emails.
Maybe the form didn't work properly? I tried sending a couple of test emails to myself and those got through at least. Maybe the service had some aggressive spam filtering enabled for me? It at least seems to require you to click on a "I'm not a robot" check box.
More likely this site is just an unnoticed corner of the web that will never be discovered beyond the few friends I send links to.
This is how it looked and it might just be the placeholder text I used, but it does look quite messy as well. I tried to make it tie into the post, somehow, but it also looks a bit like I'm begging for feedback. So that didn't work.
While removing that I also found some other things to tweak.
Other changes
I changed the date format to a date and time format beneath the title of the posts and removed my name. I'm the only writer on this site and that is indicated in the footer.
I adjusted the font and margin styles some. I wanted fewer fonts to fall back to, making for a more consistent
look on different devices. Hopefully I didn't cut too many, as the sans-serif is
a bit of a wild card.
Meta data for updated posts. I thought I had at least a concept of last change, but must have removed that at one point. Probably when changing how I built this site. I've created a changelog format I can use like when I forgot to add a TV show.
Markdown and Code blocks
I'm building this site using metalsmith, a system to create static websites using javascript. I have changed to using the CLI version, so that post is a bit out of date, as well. Anyways, this is a plugins based system relying heavily on user space plugins. Software created and maintained by individuals. The problem with that is how people will only maintain these things as long as they use them and they either stop or just doesn't use it that often. I'm also guilty of that.
The problem is that I might need a new feature or bugfix which is upgraded in a dependency of a plugin, but the plugin itself is not updated and doesn't use the latest version. Options might have changed in external libraries and this might also not be forwarded correctly by the plugin. This leaves me with a couple of options.
- Fork the plugin and make my changes. I can then try to submit those changes to the original author and/or just use my fork.
- Inline the plugin in my codebase, do those changes and refer to that.
- Look at what I actually need to solve and create my own plugin. Usually these plugins are only wrappers to call other javascript libraries and I can use those dependencies directly. The benefit of this is that it makes it a lot clearer what my actual dependencies are.
I've done a bit of all up until now. I haven't submitted any of my own plugins to the ecosystem though.
This time I found it easiest to create my own plugin to call Remarkable and highlight.js directly instead of two plugins that didn't want to cooperate properly and used outdated versions of those libraries. I think that fixed a couple of weird things I've seen with code blocks on this site.