End of the year to-do list

A quick note to keep myself honest about some upcoming work…

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a proof of concept for moving Horse Racing Datasets to Eleventy. The current version uses Airtable, Vue and Sergey as my own odd Jamstack concoction. It also uses Tailwind CSS.

I’ve wanted to redo the CSS and improve accessibility on this site for awhile, but there’s also an opportunity to improve the performance using Eleventy. Airtable is pretty much functioning like a spreadsheet rather than a database for this site, so a large part of my proof of concept has been focused on turning those records into markdown files. So far so good!

Other items I’ve been working on…

• How to change the workflow of adding datasets
• How to translate the data taxonomy
• Changes to the site structure

This is all going well and I’ve got almost all the questions answers. It’s tempting to blather on about it here but I’ll save it for a longer article once the redesign is done. I haven’t started working on the visual design, but I expect it to be more along the lines of a slight refresh than an overhaul.

I don’t know that I’ll have this done by the end of the year, but I’m going to try!

Nothing drastic here, just going to give the Generator a visual refresh. The initial launch was in December 2018, and and earlier this year I gave it an update. I still really like the font and I think the layout still works, so this year’s refresh will be strictly color palette. And maybe I’ll add a toggle between light and dark mode.

I did a little Eleventy proof for this site too, but unlike Horse Racing Datasets this Airtable instance does function as a database, so I’ll have to up my Javascript game and work a little harder to figure out how to make this one work. I have a lot of notes and pretty much know where I need to improve my skills. It’ll be a matter of making time for it and not get distracted by the siren song of a new project (feels like tempting fate even typing that lol).

My to-do list for this site has a few things that are just a matter of knocking them out. The one most likely to get done by the end of the year is an article on using dynamic header levels with Eleventy and Nunjucks. I’d also like to update the footer and add a dark mode, but don’t think I’ll get to those by the end of the year. We’ll see!