Content enrichment

Hey there! 👋

You may be wondering what I've been up to lately, unless you've been following the repository on GitHub, in which case you already know. It's a lot of work, mostly under the hood, but I'm really excited to share it with you!

Rich content authoring

One of the things that I haven't really been able to do in the past is to create truly rich content. So, as usual, I decided to make my own tools to fit my needs.

After a lot of fiddling around, I managed to create a system around Web Components, allowing me to progressively enhance content with interactive elements, such as code tabs, LaTeX expressions, Baseline support and interactive visualizations. It's not much yet, but I'm hoping to grow this library of components over time to fit the needs of the content I write.

Code highlighting

Up until a while ago, I was using Prism for code highlighting, but I found it to be a little restrictive in some aspects, while its highlighting wasn't perfect in some cases.

Most websites nowadays use Shiki, so, naturally, I gave it a try and I was pleasantly surprised. It's a fair bit slower, but the output quality is much better, while I can now support new functionality that wasn't possible before, such as line highlighting or bracket colorization.

I kept Prism around for the development environment to provide a frictionless experience when hot reloading during editing, but other than that you should never really see Prism in the current setup. It may make a comeback in the future, if I ever get around to adding interactive code editing, but that may be a while.

Article embedding

On top of these changes, I worked out a way to embed article previews inside other articles. These appear similar to article previews in listings, so they should be familiar. I also made sure to make them as least intrusive as possible, so they should not be too distracting.

Their purpose is to provide a way to interlink articles and provide a better reading experience. They are tagged with keyword-like prompts, such as Quick refresher, Further reading, or You might also like, depending on the context.

I'm working to retroactively add these to older articles, but it takes a long time, so you may not see them all over the place just yet.

Quite a lot of work has gone into these changes, but there may be the occasional bug here and there. If you notice anything, please let me know.

Until next time! 🍻