Changelog

The following changelog reflects system, functional, and stylistic updates. You can find content updates as part of the Updates page or as new blog posts.

Added Top 4 page.
Removed Privacy Policy note about Webmentions. I stopped using and including a webmention pingback URL in September, 2023.
Add tag list to RSS feed.
Added “gatherer of books” to my About page.
Rename role=menu and role=menuitem to role=list and role=listitem respectively. This is based on my read of Be Careful Using ‘Menu’ — Adrian Roselli.
Epigraphs presented in “random order”; each time I export my epigraphs, I write them in a random order. In this way I hope to create more opportunities for serendipity.
Remove backlinks of Epigraphs to where I’ve referenced them.
Add additional microformat properties to document elements.
Removed rel="tag" from body A-tags. Added link[rel=tag] to header.
Create XSL for /index.xml; thus providing a “pretty” render for the RSS feed. This includes a how to do RSS.
Promote RSS Feed to Site Navigation. Remove direct links to ATOM and JSON feed; those still exist and are declared in the HTML head element.
Remove most colors from the site. Minimal colors is just fine.
Removing Schema.org elements. I can restore them if I want, but it cuts down each page by at least 5 Kilobytes.
Adding progressive Javascript enhancement for sidenotes.
Adding ASCII-based bargraph to stats page.
Add Reply to Post link to page.
Move copyright section to bottom of page.
Simplifying the DL-tag options. This reflects that I most often want a somewhat tabular view of a definition list.
Added the In the Shadows of Mont Brun; marking several posts as part of the series.
Released many prior works under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Added a <link rel="blogroll"> to site header; available at /blogroll.opml.
Added Have Toolbox; Will Share for past and future presentations.
Established the conceptual “Presentations” subdirectory; may look to move past presentations there.
Disallow CCBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot, Google-Extended, Omgilibot, and FacebookBot via robots.txt. See Block the Bots that Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website by Neil Clarke.
Enabled offline capabilities of Errant Encumberance, Speed, and Movement Dice Calculator by implementing a Service Worker.
Improved accessibility of Errant Encumberance, Speed, and Movement Dice Calculator.
Added Errant Encumberance, Speed, and Movement Dice Calculator.
Removing Webmentions. Discovering a lot more spammers. This follows on Alex Schroeder’s Web mentions vs. referrals.
Converting “Post by Year” page into Post Statistics page.
Disallowing GPTBot via robots.txt file. See GPTBot for details.
Removing Services from the homepage. You can still find it in the Site Map.
For posts that are session reports and are part of a series, added explicit link to that series.
Adding Abstract/Summary to blog posts, listings, and feeds. I’m moving away from the H2 tag as part of the header, instead favoring an abstract. This better maps to how I’m writing my posts.
Adding Javascript to inform people that their browser has DRM through their proposed “Web Integrity Environment” antics.
Adding Colophon to summarize the creation and maintenance of this site.
Excluding many summary pages from search results. These pages don’t have any meaningful content. One example of an excluded page is Tags.
Adding Bibliography page to reflect the books I’ve read.
Favoring https://schema.org/Quotation over https://schema.org/CreativeWork for blockquote elements.
Removing aria-hidden properties from “middle dot” characters (e.g. ·). This was recommended by the axe DevTools.
Adding “Reply by Email” link to each post on page, RSS entry, and ATOM entry.
Changed color scheme to map to Modus Tinted Themes. Bringing a softening of the background and foreground colors.
Fixing logic that counted pages on the Posts by Years page and the subpages. Prior to the fix, I was skipping my reviews.
I added the section.inline-comments HTML element and CSS class. Their usage warrants a blog post.
Broadened the scope of tags, to compress 378 tags down to just under 59.
Improving the accessibility of the top-level navigation by ensuring labeled [role=listitem] elements.
Removed tag and series next/previous navigation links from homepage.
Adding Syndications taxonomy.
Adding rel='me' entry for DEV.to.
Removing the rel=“next” and rel=“prev” for tags and series.
Renaming Previous Posts to Older Posts. And Next Posts to Newer Posts.
Added an Epigraphs section under the Site-Map.
Updated scripts for building Glossary entries. Now tags and inline mentions are counted. Prior to this change, only inline mentions.
Replacing 📖 with 🔍 for definitions. The book is a bit more visually disruptive, whereas the magnifying glass is just a bit more subtle. I like that visual weight.
Reworking usage of glossary terms to use a unified glossary.html shortcode, this has created some odd rendering of past posts. I’m working through those oddities.
Replacing [email protected] with [email protected].
Updating Glossary of Terms to consolidate links to games, abbreviations, and mentions.
Adding my resume.
Adding Content Disclaimers.
Removing Mastodon and Twitter Likes from a post’s list of webmentions.
Adding Series to Session Reports index page.
Added Help Building your Résumé to the list of services I offer.
Replacing old [email protected] address with [email protected].
Adjusting navigation for related articles. In a post’s metadata section, I’ve added a next and previous link for each tag. This allows you to readily navigate posts by tag. I’m not entirely satisfied with the look as it introduces a lot to visually parse. However, I believe the utility is nice to have.
Adjusting page neighbor rendering; This now follows similarly to how I render next and previous links.
For a given breadcrumb, replacing the last in the trail with a cite tag. Prior to this change it was an a tag.
What I’m doing is moving the related links to within the given article’s header. I think this makes semantic sense.
Exposing RSS feeds for each Licenses, Series, and Tags.
Exposing RSS feeds for each individual License, Series, and Tag.
Adding Atom and RSS feeds for Updates and Changelog
Migrated site hosting from Github Pages to Nearly Free Speech. See Farewell Github Pages, Hello Nearly Free Speech for the specifics.
Added rel="up" and rel="home" attributes to appropriate links. These attributes help with keyboard navigation and assistive technology.
Adding pagination to the years pages (e.g. Posts for 2020).
Added an Embedded license declaration to the site; This allows me to mix licenses. An example of an embedded licenses is at A Refinement to the Ubiquitous Initiative Procedure.
Extracting data/glossary.yml file. Also extrating abbr.html and dfn.html shortcode. These are now part of the takeonrules-hugo-theme Git repository.
Re-arranging breadcrumbs for posts; They now belong to the more meaningful posts for the year page.
Removing accesskey attribute from elements. Following guidance from https://webaim.org/techniques/keyboard/accesskey, the implementation is too haphazard and may conflict with screen readers.
Updating the year pages (e.g. /2020/) with additional metadata content.
Replacing “|” (eg. pipe) with “·” (eg. middot) as separator between paginator items and tags. This change reduces the visual weight of those separators.
Restructing the Site Map page. Instead of using a DL, I went with a SECTION tag and H2 tag. This markup better indicates the structure of my website.
Removing font declarations; Your browser allows you to pick those settings. Personally, for serif I’m using ETBembo, for sans-serif I’m using Helvetica, and for monospace I’m using JetBrains Mono.
Removing most line height declarations; I’m finding that the browser does a reasonable enough job. This is provisional, as line heigh is one of those tempermental aesthetics.
Removing pixel declaration from stylesheet; Your browser allows you to set those values.
Reworking semantics of marginalia; It’s complicated! Moving from INS to SMALL[role=note] and DIV[role=note]. These better represent the semantics. And reserves INS for updates of the document.
Switching back from RDFa to Microdata; RDFa assumes a much more XHTML format and validation, which is antithetical to my understanding of HTML. In addition, I encountered parsing issues where some attributes rippled into other objects.
Switched semantic markup from Microdata to RDFa for schema.org declarations. Microdata is limited to HTML whereas RDFa extends into other SGML-based languages. In addition RDFa is more mature and Microdata struggled to find specification editors.
Adding a Session Reports page.
Replacing series slug with series’s title in HTML > HEAD > TITLE and BODY nav.breadcrumbs. This means more human readable page titles for the series pages.
Adding a Privacy Policy.
Renaming header naviation from More Stuff to Site Map.
Replacing ↑ character with 📖 for rendering link to an abbreviation’s definition.
When rendering an abbreviation, only the first instance on a page contains a link to the definitions.
When a post is part of a series, I’ve added a Series Navigation to the top of a that page.
Further refinements to light and dark color scheme. I’ve added a few hover states and tightened up the colors. Also learned about CSS var.
Updated color scheme for both light and dark mode. The colors are drawn from Modus Themes.
Refined marginalia rendering. This involved removing unnecessary DIV tag and moving the role='note' to the INS tag. This change required that I classify the INS tag as either margin or side, which isn’t a bad thing to include. I also used printf in Hugo to concatenate the update shortcode for margin. This removed an unnecessary P-tag.
Updating Glossary to include more information regarding identifiers.
Updating the Updates page to use multiple DETAILS instead of TABLE.
Added tabindex to div that encloses tables. This builds on the guidance I found at Inclusive Components: Data Tables.
Adding underline values to most access key eneabled elements.
Moving Contact Me to footer; I have a contact me on the About page; I hope that’s enough.
Removing Blog Roll from top navigation.
Renaming Metadata to More.
Updating about page to include Access Keys for Take on Rules website.
Adding a Glossary page, which I hope tidies up the representation of the abbreviations, their definition, and their usage.
Deprecated Abbreviations page, as the Glossary page page better handles this kind of information.
Converting review blog posts to incorporate http://schema.org/Review elements. The hierarchy is now WebPage > BlogPosting > Review. I’m not satisfied, as this results in two mainEntityOfPage itemprops, which could cause issues. However, the homepage operates as a http://schema.org/Blog. This would need to change as Review is not a BlogPosting.
Adding itemprop='about' for tags mapped to defined items.
Removing JSON+LD representation in HEAD of document. Instead favor Microdata format.
Added Dark Mode via CSS selector @media screen and (prefers-color-scheme: dark)
Adding accesskey w for any webmentions/pingbacks.
Exposing webmention and pingback end point.
Adding JSON+LD about attribubte to relate tags to their corresponding Wikidata entries.
Adding shortcode to render ABBR tag, with conditional itemscope links to corresponding Wikidata entries.
Adding rake audit:visual to provide a quick smoke test of CSS/UI changes against a representative sample of pages.
Removing Mousetrap JS. The last key that I had was Ctrl + s; It disabled the stylesheet. I have sinced mapped hotkeys for Firefox to do the same thing.
Updated margin figures to render in a FIGURE tag. Prior to this they were in an ASIDE P CSS selector. As both are block elements, I opted to remove the ASIDE P in favor of the singular FIGURE. This also gives me a FIGCAPTION tag that helps add context to the figure.
Adding the page number to the HTML HEAD TITLE where applicable
Adding to the home page each post’s headline or description (if one is present).
Adjusting the homepage layout. Moving away from my beloved DL-tags to simple P-tags.
Adding table of site-wide abbreviations, their meaning, and links to referenced pages.
Adding ABBR tags to most first instances of an abbreviation in a each page.
Fixing updates declared as sidenotes to render in the margin and not render content following the update outside of P-tags.
Moving breadcrumbs and paginator out of article.
Removing search input box in favor of top level navigation.
Adding html { scroll-behavior:smooth; } CSS.
Adding index number to homepage OL elements. These numbers now map to their corresponding accesskey; The first entry, has an accesskey of 1. The 10th entry has an access key of 0.
Improving accessibility by adding accesskey attributes to HTML elements. Removing Javascript for triggering keys that now have an accesskey.
Moved /years/ to /more/years/ (preserving old URLs)
Removing alternate JSON rendering of pages. The rendered JSON was JSON+LD which is already imbedded in the HTML version of the page.
Removing extraneous HTML elements. In removing these elements, and moving towards less block level elements in the top navigation, the No Styles rendering of the headers better reflects the CSS version.
Reworking CSS to align margin and main column content when content starts with a margin element.
Search via Lunr.js now uses /search.json instead of /index.json.
Fixing long-standing hidden bug in which the RSS feeds had relative URLs.
Adding word count to Years page.
Adjusting CSS for smaller screens to increase spacing between links.
Reworking semantic markup: Moving breadcrumbs outside of article tag; Changing metadata and related posts from an aside tag to a footer > nav
Removed footer links for RSS and Email. Those are in About and Contact Me. The graphic fonts did not render well.
Adding mousetrap.js to add hot keys: Ctrl + s toggles stylesheets, Ctrl + p goes to previous section (if on exists), Ctrl + n goes to next section (if one exists), Ctrl + 0 goes to the home page, Ctrl + 1 goes to the second menu item (About), Ctrl + 2 to third (Contact Me), etc.
Adjusting rendering order of navigation and article H1 tags.
Favoring the <ins> tag for margin and side notes. This creates a more satisfying behavior when stylesheets are disabled.
Removing toggle-ability of sidenotes. The HTML requires an input element, which looked odd in RSS feeds.
Adjusting semantic markup of the site.
Minor semantic changes to the HTML; In reviewing the semantics they are not quite right.
Changing the marginnote to be an <aside> element. The Marginnote already rendered within a p-tag, which was a display block element. In using an aside, I can remove an extra <span> element and use a more semantically correct element.
Continued work to compress the CSS and remove extraneous declarations.
Moving Changelog from top-level page to a page under Metadata.
Adding rake social:to_mastodon task to help syndicate content to Mastodon.
Removing Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
Adding closing parenthesis “)” to sidenotes.
Established Changelog, and began backfilling.
Removing Google Form previously used for contacting me. Just email me at [email protected].
Tidied up HTML markup for Metadata external links
Adding audit task to look for images without ALT tags; At present this audit logs warnings.
Adding audit task to look for unexpanded strikethrough.
Loading CSS inline, instead of as a linked resource. While each page now has a larger size, this reduces the number of HTTP requests per page load.
Removing custom font in favor of Times, Courier, and Ariel. This saves approximately 200 KB on uncached requests.
Modifying exporter to also export posts to Reddit markdown format. See rake -T for details.
Adding “Into the Unknown” and “The Markdown SRD5” to Open Game License for site.
Adding color to code section rendering.
Cleaning up code CSS to better handle first line of code.
Amending audit scripts to address frequent false positives regarding unexpanded markdown directives.
Creating content exporter to export posts to BoardGameGeek forum format. See rake -T for details.
Adding Lunr.js as site-wide search leveraging TakeOnRules.com’s index.json page.
Switch site build from Jekyll.rb to Hugo.
Launch of new TakeOnRules.com blog (see announcement)