MCB Technical Update: November 2022

Visually the blog hasn't changed much since a substantial overhaul in July but several weeks ago I started playing around with some other static site generators after I noticed the footer had broken sometime in the last month. Publii has been an outstanding tool for building the blog from scratch but I grew frustrated when I (mistakenly 😅) thought a theme update broke my custom CSS. I was unable to fix the problem within a reasonable time frame so I decided to look for greener pastures elsewhere.

I read about Hugo but several reviews pointed me towards something simpler named Zola (I like simple.) I spent some time reading and setting it up before deciding Publii provides everything I want in a considerably more convenient package. With Zola tagging, date beautification, image processing, site design, and other stuff would have to be researched, built, and tested before coming to parity with the existing website so I decided to just give up, dig in, and figure out what was causing my Publii woes.

It turned out to be my own lousy CSS tweaks that busted my footer and two hours later my main.css file was synced up with Publii's Simple Theme and Milwaukee County Blog is polished and humming along like the good old days of months past.

There are two lingering issues yet to find a resolution; if you have any ideas please get in touch below! The first is a spacing issue with a podcast iframe. There's too much whitespace below the iframe and my duct-tape fix broke my footer. The second issue is dragons within the built-in gallery. When a user hovers their pointer over an image, the caption displays over it but if there is a long caption it overlaps other photos so that when an user clicks a different image, the incorrect image expands instead. I'd like to simply disable the caption so that it only displays after someone clicks an image.