Process Post #4 - Blogging with Middleman
January 30, 2025
Converting my blog from bare HTML to the Middleman framework has meant re-wording each element into a new syntax: ERB. This syntax means using Ruby (a language I have never used before) to describe templates and components that can be re-used and nested together. This simple task became an uncharted territory of errors which I had never encountered before--however still less frustrating than WordPress. Now that I have created new elements such as project cards, blog entries, coffee reviews, buttons, and galleries, I no longer have to copy and paste the same HTML code over and over again!
Placeholder Roaster
Steamed Milk: 0 / 5.0
Flavour: 0 / 5.0
Scent: 0 / 5.0
Ambiance: 0 / 5.0
This is a placeholder summary for the review.
With these elements I can focus less on developing a usable website, and transition to building blog content, accessibility tools, and reduce load time. My plan is to figure out the most up to date tool for compressing images, as my current homepage loads a whopping 12.5MB of data due to images. Further, static websites are limited in the variety of accessibility tools since they cannot respond dynamically to the user. Instead I have to focus on the website design (contrast, scale, consistency), as well as long-existing backend tools such as alt text and screen reader labels. Secondary goals are to add a light/dark mode toggle, and ensure it can be navigated with the keyboard.
As far as content does, I have finally implemented the first functional prototype of the project that inspired me to start this website: a coffee review map titles cafe-nated. This project aims to be an interactive garden of my experiences and rankings of coffee shops and roasteries listed according to their geography. It uses a custom colour scheme build on the Google Maps API roughly according to Solarized. Many of my current reviews are scribbled digitally in random notes apps, jumbled shorthand and different ranking metrics. I aim through this course to contribute to these reviews as part of my blog.
A perk of the Middleman framework is that these reviews are saved as blog entries! In the same workflow as my POSIEL content, the reviews are articles of the cafe-nated blog. This means that as I create new entries, the automatically populate the maps page, and can be rendered in other formats such as the cards used in projects and the list view in posiel. Ideally, I would consolidate these blogs into the same database, using tags to differentiate them, however I am not set on doing this for longevity. Yet.