During my last site redesign, I removed the category images. Today, I added them back, but only in specific cases. Although I usually try to add an image to my articles, some don’t need them. In those cases, I wanted to use the default category image.
As of today, articles without images will display the category’s instead. This now works in most sections including the top news, article and RSS feed. It’s a rather simple fix that reduces article creation and provides a consistent look to the site.
With this in place, I can now update the article view to look like the top news. That is a change for a future date. For now, I’ve added it to my backlog.
As of today, I now have SSL enabled for my primary website. By default, it will now redirect to https. I did some house cleaning to fix any warnings or blocked content, but I’m sure I missed a few things. Note that this change doesn’t impact my subdomains. Over the next few months, I plan to phase out the subdomains in favor of landing pages within my primary domain.
While checking my RSS feeds, I found that there were a few issues that needed fixing. Most were cosmetic and didn’t directly impact the feed.
Today though, I ran into a real bug. I’ve started to add alternate text to my images. This ensure accessibility as well allows pins to properly display their titles. I displayed most of the images using UBBC. Because of this, I added a customized version that I can add alternate text to. Yet, I forgot to update the code that creates the RSS feed causing them to display incorrectly. I updated the code to fix that.
I also learned that Flipboard mucks with the HTML code and expects the feed to be well formed HTML5. Although I do that with my articles, I generally leave the RSS alone due to other issues. I’m currently debating the best way to correct that, but for now I’ve left things as is.
Some of the social media shares weren’t working so I updated them. I was trying to avoid using scripts, but couldn’t get them to work. I even tried using a different service with no luck.
Pinterest is using their default script with a custom image to match the rest. It works as expected now.
I added Flipboard since I’m building magazines with it. I have to use their script as well. They don’t offer a custom image, which isn’t a big deal since Font Awesome doesn’t have one for Flipboard anyway. As this is an experiment, I may change in the future.
Well, crud. Finally figured out why some of the Font Awesome icons I wanted to use weren’t showing up. I was loading an older version! With that fixed, I cleaned up a few things—including adding the final icon (topics) to the top menu. While doing so, I also added tooltips and aria labels to a number of icons to make them more accessible.