I wanted my blog to show “top” posts first rather than recent, but ranking by hits finds boring reference articles, and ranking by LessWrong or Hacker News karma ignores anything that wasn’t shared, and is dependent on the whims of frontpage algorithms.
I figured this was a problem for AI, and was going to have Claude rank the posts with an ELO-style ranking, but it said that would require several thousand API calls and convinced me to let it rank blocks at a time instead.
I was inspired by Turntrout to optimize my website more, and two changes took page load times from “fast enough” to “effectively instant: Switching from CloudFront to Bunny CDN to optimize CDN cache misses, and efficiently navigating with Micromorph.
It’s that time of year again: Time to make needless improvements to my website. This time, I was annoyed about how my pages were showing up in Google, so I added Microdata to my articles. One thing lead to another, and I ended up with Microdata, Open Graph, a better sitemap, fewer useless pages, and much improved reading mode support.
If you read this blog, you might assume it doesn’t update because I have nothing to talk about. The truth is, I have a lot I want to say, but I usually don’t feel like writing when I’m at my computer.
One thing I post a lot of is commentary …
My last update made this site render better on small screens, but didn’t look right on Android. It looks like the problem is that mobile browsers do weird things on the assumption that website developers are idiots (generally a valid assumption). MDN has an article about how to fix it …
I decided a couple of days ago that this site really needed a responsive design, since it’s the cool thing to do and stuff.
diff --git a/themes/brendanlong/static/css/style.css b/themes/brendanlong/static
index 96a16b4..eb493b9 100644
--- a/themes/brendanlong/static/css/style.css
+++ b/themes …I set up an SSL certificate for this site today and it was surprisingly easy.
Last time I wanted a free certificate, it was a huge pain. This time it was actually easy. A Google search for “ssl certificates stackoverflow” lead me to the Cheapest web certificates question …