They found us...
Under surveillance
Bad news… The Big G found us, and we’re officially indexed and listed by Google.
Okay, it’s not actually the worst thing in the world to be listed by the world’s biggest search engine. I’ll cope. At least now you can find me by looking up barilaro dot me, or some variation thereof.
I pinky promise it isn’t sponsored content
Cleaning up under the hood
To celebrate, I thought I’d finally cave in explore the world of
semantic HTML5. If you don’t know,
HTML is what the web is written in. It’s nothing too crazy, just some
things called tags (like <p>, for paragraph) that tells your browser
(Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.) how to make things look.
Semantic HTML5 is the latest version of HTML (numba fahv) and it tries
to also tell your browser what things are, not just how to slap ‘em
onto a page. Using semantic HTML5, Googlebot
(the soulless friendly robot that helps Google build its shit list search results)
can actually understand what’s on your webpage and how its laid out.
In the days of yore, web developers used to mark a section using a tag
like <div>. They also used to mark banners using a <div>. They
also used to mark sidebars with a <div>. They also used to mark their
sock drawer with a <div>, their storage boxes, and so on. Googlebot
had no idea how to treat a <div> because everyone used them in different
ways. Now that HTML5 is here, we can use a <section> to mark a section,
a <header> to mark a banner, a main content section with a <main>…
You name it, HTML5 has a tag for it. Googlebot can now understand a webpage -
even though it doesn’t have eyes - just by seeing what tags are where.
Even better, something like Safaritron 3000 on your iPhone (or just Safari,
because Apple’s CEO of naming hates fun) can put webpages into a really
nice reader view
with just the content, no buttons or other web-specific bits.
How distinguished.
Pretty nifty, if you ask me.
Too big for my own programming britches
And in addition to all that, it seems I outgrew postmaker. Rather, I wanted something a little more swanky for my website than just listing my posts. After much lamenting (read the postmaker post to know why), I decided to switch over to Hugo. I stand by the fact that static site generators are a bit too complex for my liking, but now I understand why; they’re very powerful, very flexible, and quite a bit faster than a hodge-podge Bash script. Making templates for my pages is a pain, but waiting a full minute for my site to be put together is just painful enough that the swap was worth it. If you’re hand-rolling your HTML or have a similar workflow, as much as it feels like a betrayal to say it, I think you’d be well-served by a site generator like Hugo. You only have to learn a tiny templating language, and you still get to use HTML, so it’s not too horrible.
That’s a wrapper!
And so ends the newz. New look, new workflow, and new surveillance by the overlords at Silicon Valley. Stay tuned, and see ya next post.
