I only wanted to do some write-ups of recent projects. Some nice-looking, detailled write-ups. But… on this old and aging website? Naaah. Let’s just rewrite it real quick! And maybe revisit some of the cringiest old pages, while I’m at it.

Did I use my procrastination powers to trick myself into doing a huge chore by avoiding two other tasks? Maybe! :)

Random notes:

• I might not need 300K of Bootstrap code, but it sure helped during prototyping the new design.
• 20K CSS directives remain in heckmeck-bootstrip.css
• Responsive design by hand is no magic; even after I abolished the full-blown Bootstrap grid system, it was not too difficult (well, bearable) to get the pages to render nicely in different resolutions, down to my old iPhone SE.
  
• Adding width and height attributes to <img> elements still matters as it did in 1995 (avoiding layout pauses and reflows).
• Even with a relatively simple site like this, the navigation concepts will go through some iterations.
• Didn’t know about the expand/collapse functionality offered by the <details>/<summary> elements in plain HTML. Nice!
• <mark> tag is cool, too.
• I need a better way to enter typographic quotes under Windows. Too bad I switched to a keyboard without a num block (no more Alt + 0146 for me), and the built-in char picker (Windows key + “.”) is just bonkers.
• Static files and directories with a little PHP glue can get you a long way.
• iOS devices do not playback the sound of .mp4 videos if the audio stream is mp3-encoded; you need to convert the audio stream to AAC. For future reference: ffmpeg -i old.mp4 -acodec aac -vcodec copy new.mp4
• I love this stuff. (The low-level craftsmanship of handwriting everything, that is.)