Where have all the pictures gone

I have (finally) gotten RSS feed reading back in action¹ and added some blogs of other web designers/developers. In particular I have been very inspired by Bryce Wray.

In the case of the disappearance of images, Bryce’s post about CTCAJW mode got me thinking². In particular he mentions:

… each of my posts has usually sported a big ol’ hero image as the background for the post’s title, description, and date-of-issuance info. That, too, has been limiting and even delaying, even if only as a lame excuse on my part. After all, it’s not always possible to find a freebie stock photo that has even a tangential connection to a post’s subject(s).

To which I will add that finding images that have a suitable license for my public repositories³ is even more difficult. Not to mention one has to deal with attribution and noting the ownership and licensing when the images are not one’s own work.

At times I have played around with creating my own images, but that takes even longer and the results were often of lesser quality than found images⁴

I also think that being able to use Hugo’s Text filter to auto-generate ‘social’ cards (e.g. Facebook’s Open Graph protocol and Twitter ‘cards’) using a background image and applying text has two major benefits.

1. I don’t need to manage an image for each page or post.
2. It allows me to auto-generate meaningful ‘alt’ text for the card, which I believe makes my accessibility experience more equitable.

Bryce went a different way with this but it was his mention of the concept that gave me the push to ‘get it done’.

Of course I am also planning to return to page bundles as he mentions, although not because of ‘social’ cards. In addition, Bryce’s article on Pagefind suggests that it might be possible to finally have search on this site, without too much pain. And, as if I didn’t have a long enough list, for the documentation part of this site I want to bring back the page navigation sidebar on large screens, with a suitable CSS-only mobile menu, for navigation of nested pages.

There are also styling improvements to be made, not to mention needing to deal with high density monitors and mobile devices, automatically using dark or light mode depending on the browser default, and I also want to get rid of use of the third party contact form⁵.

In short, the pictures have (mostly) gone away so that I have more time to work on improvements to my theme and websites (and hopefully write more often as well).