I am running this blog with the default layout/template that hakyll ships with for far longer than I initially hoped for. I wanted a different theme or wanted to give it a face lift from the time I set it up but I never really got to it or prioritized it.
I think now is the perfect time(since I have taken the next couple of days off from work). This might probably be a good time to work on the face lift.
I have over the years been looking through various blogs(hakyll and others) for things that I can steal get inspired from and add to this blog.
Mini icons for tags
One thing I liked during my.opera blog days is the ability to add icons which would replace tag texts. It was fun and cute! But that might be a bit of over kill for a static site(idea of which is to load faster for an end user) and possibly utilize less bandwith. Having said that I will still not rule out this idea.
Show hyperlinks in pop-up window
One of the really nice and highly customized hakyll blog that I have encountered so far is :Gwern Branwen’s blog, but this too is a little extreme customization(possibly for some other day). But I like his idea of dealing with links in the blog posts. Hovering over links pop-up a little window to the link as oppose to having to open a new tab. I am a fan of this because I have a habit of opening links and leaving the original article in a unfinished state. This idea is nice because I can read the hyperlinked item and quickly get back to the original article/blog post.
Sticky posts
This is also something of a legacy thing from my my.opera days of blogging. Where I usually used to have sticky posts, that would always be on top. I am pretty sure if I search the web hard enough someone would have implemented this in the hakyll side, and I can just leverage it. (This is also part of my hakyll wishlist). If I had this figured I would have stickied this post since I envision editing and adding more to this post until I have actually finished the redesign of this blog.
Sorting blog posts
Right now there is no way to view posts by categories/tags. I think there is a benefit to view posts by tags/categories and even year. If possible even by month and display how many posts. As that would give me a better sense of how I am doing with my writing goals.
Password protecting blog posts
This might be a stretch for static sites but still I do want some posts that are protected behind passwords. Mainly because I want to be able to access them and also because it might not be of much use to others besides me(don’t ask why then do I want it to be as a post on the blog instead of somewhere else).
Banner for blog posts when I want to.
Pretty self explanatory but the idea is to have a banner for blog posts when specified.
Better Code highlighting
Nothing too fancy just a better color scheming for the code tags.
Making the first letter of the blog post bigger/similar to newspaper style.
I had a css tweak in my.opera just to do this. If I scan through my backup drives maybe I will be able to find it and can plug it in.
Alternate universe
My monkey brain sees no bounds. Few days/weeks ago I would seemed like I would have denounced xmonad the next moment I would be back at using it. Instead of having multiple posts, it might be fun idea to have an alternate universe button which would show the 2 versions of my thoughts/blog posts. On that note I also want to try this as a theme for some of my posts in the future.
Better image handling
Pretty much common thing but isn’t there in the default hakyll is the images don’t show the alt/caption text. I want to show the alt/caption below the text inside a bordered field.
RSS
This is for nostalgia purposes. I have/had been a huge RSS fan. That is how I subscribe to my favorite blogs and keep up with the latest posts. And I still subscribe to some of the blogs using RSS. I miss that in the more new sites/blogs that don’t have a RSS feed.
Ability to post at a particular date
I would like to write posts that need to go live at a particular date.