TrickJarrett.com

How to Use My Blog

6/9/2023 8:08 am | Share to:

A blog should be user friendly. I want people to enjoy reading my blog. But I also want my blog to have a lot of fun gadgets and be a means for me to express my creativity and love of programming. These things can be in opposition at times.

This page is my effort to catalog and provide some useful signposts to help folks get comfortable and better parse through this archive of mine.

Search

In May 2025 I implemented site search. It searches both posts on this blog, as well as my social archives from X, Bluesky, and Mastodon. The X archive includes a number of now-deleted posts from over the years.

Headers

  1. If a link in a header is in quotation marks, it signifies my titling matches the article's own title at the time of publishing. All other link titles are editorialized by me.
  2. I also add a few icons to header links: The page icon signifies an internal post which has its own page rather than just being something embedded in the daily archive. There is also an icon flagging when I'm directly linking to a PDF.

Reviews

Review posts for media get a score out of a 5 added to the header, what that scored "item" is is purely done for entertainment purposes. I just find it more enjoyable than just saying "4/5 stars."

In 2025 I began using Radar charts to share movie ratings.

Archives

The Date archive page uses collapsible headers, clicking (or tapping) expands or collapses them. When you get down to the month view and it lists out days. Any posts which have their own actual page, rather than just existing within the date page, are also shown on that view.

There are heatmaps, inspired by Github, showing post frequency for each year in the archives. This heatmap is also visible on the frontpage in the sidebar. Clicking any colored square will take you to that day's archive.

Link suffixes

My blog automatically adds flags to links, most notably is it showing the domain. It also adds a flag when I am linking to a domain which is known for paywalling. Trying to save people clicks when they don't want to be surprised to face the paywall.

Those were the items I wanted to explain off the top of my head, I'll see what other tips come up and I'll come back to update this.

Behind the Scenes

The blog is written using my own homebrewed content management system named Glowbug. It is written in PHP and Mysql. I have no plans to ever make it public for two reasons:

  1. It is far inferior to other options out there.
  2. It has far too much me-centric stuff in its design.

Posts on the blog are largely written using a tweaked Markdown syntax.

I've introduced a few tweaks of my own:

  1. Links enabling mouse-over text.
  2. Image URLs allowing me to assign classes to the generated image.
  3. Other custom embedding functions such as for videos, movie information, etc.

Change Log