Changelog

Added Event JSON-LD to the homepage’s Upcoming Events loop. front-page.php builds a @graph of Event objects (name, url, startDate, endDate, location, attendance mode, performer, description) straight from the same ACF fields already driving the visible cards. Google can now potentially build rich result cards for talks I’m speaking at, without a second data source to maintain. Virtual events are auto-detected from the location text and marked VirtualLocation instead of Place.

event_end_date used to require an explicit value even for a single-day event. front-page.php now defaults the JSON-LD endDate to startDate when the field’s left blank. The ACF field stays around only for genuine multi-day events.

New ms_changelog post type plus a feed template styled after the About page’s timeline: version badges, a live stats strip computed at render time (entry count, current version, how long this has been going), and filterable categories. Entries here aren’t hand-written after the fact. After any session that ships something worth mentioning, a draft entry gets written straight into this post type for review before it goes live.

Event cards get a custom CTA label field. Set it, and the button links straight to that event’s own URL with your own text (e.g. “Register now”) instead of always falling back to “book a meeting with me.” Titles also got restyled in the accent color with a small ↗ marker so they read as clickable at a glance, instead of blending into the surrounding text.

Standalone embed blocks (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) were overflowing the viewport edge on phones. Fixed by wrapping them in an aspect-ratio:16/9 container with the iframe positioned to fill it, rather than the older padding-bottom percentage trick. Separately, a blank gap opened up under the nav on small screens: the page reserves 60px of top padding to clear the fixed nav bar, but the nav itself switches to position:relative at 640px, so that padding became pure dead space. Zeroed out below that breakpoint.

The Diff, a biweekly read on AI and WordPress, publishes as regular posts in a dedicated category rather than a custom post type. Every issue is automatically indexed, shows up in RSS, and appears in the blog archive and homepage Latest Posts with zero extra plumbing. A the_content filter auto-injects the newsletter masthead and subscribe button onto any post in that category, so there’s no manual step needed per issue.

Dequeuing WordPress’s block-library CSS for performance had a side effect nobody noticed until writing a post that needed it. Column blocks stopped laying out side by side, and the highlight/mark tool’s colored background disappeared. Both got a small targeted CSS hook instead of re-enabling the block library wholesale. Restoring 30KB-plus of unrelated CSS for two rules felt like the wrong trade.

The Kit signup form in the footer is a static HTML embed, not the async script Kit normally recommends. The async version creates a timing race: the script injects the form after the page has already rendered, so any CSS overrides applied before the form exists get silently ignored. Three different MutationObserver-based workarounds all failed or hurt performance before landing on the simplest option: paste the HTML directly into the template, so the form is already in the DOM before any script runs.

Latest Posts now sits directly under the hero instead of further down the page, with a “see all posts” button. The hero itself shrank to a square 260px photo with less padding, since its job is just to say who I am before you scroll to what I actually made.

Google Fonts now load with the classic async trick: <link rel=preload as=style>, media=print swapped to all via onload, plus a <noscript> fallback for anyone without JS. That one change removes roughly 1,200ms of render-blocking time on every page, applied globally.

Dark mode preference was being applied by a deferred JS file, which runs after the page has already painted, so anyone in dark mode saw a flash of light mode on every navigation. Fixed by moving the localStorage check into a tiny inline script in <head>, so the dark attribute is set before the browser paints anything. About 150 bytes, no extra network request.

Spent ten separate CSS attempts trying to add breathing room above a card’s footer line before finding the actual cause. The description text uses -webkit-line-clamp to truncate at 3 lines, and that clamping mode collapses the element to zero height inside a flex container once flex-grow is removed, so any margin-bottom on it had nothing to push against. The fix is a plain empty <div style=”flex:1;min-height:20px”> sitting in the template between the description and the footer: a real DOM element with real height, which no CSS trick could substitute for.

Added Speculation Rules (Chrome) and instant.page (everywhere else) so top-level pages and the latest post start prerendering or prefetching the moment you hover a link. By the time you click, most of the page is already there. Also dequeued wp-embed.min.js, a script WordPress loads on every page by default even though this theme never uses WordPress’s own embed blocks.

Body text sitewide now has a 15px, font-weight 500 floor. Anything smaller or lighter than that was hard to read on some screens. Also added a real hamburger menu for mobile nav, since the menu previously just wrapped awkwardly, and fixed a dark-mode contrast issue on the primary button (near-black text on the accent orange, roughly 8:1 contrast).

Installed the browser’s View Transitions API for smoother page navigations, but it collided with the theme’s own CSS color transitions on body, .site-nav and .site-footer. Both tried to fade the same elements at once, causing visible jitter in dark mode, worst on mobile. Fixed with a :root:has(::view-transition) selector that suppresses the theme’s own transitions only while a view transition is actually running.

The first appearance card in the grid now gets fetchpriority=”high” and loading=”eager” so the browser fetches it immediately instead of waiting in the lazy-load queue. It’s usually the largest visible image on the page. Card titles switched from <h3> to <h2> to fix a heading-order gap: the page’s <h1> had no <h2> underneath it. The active filter tab’s background also moved off the site’s decorative orange (–accent) onto the AA-compliant text color (–accent-text), since the decorative shade fails contrast for anything you’re supposed to read.

This site started as a design brief (retro internet aesthetic, high contrast black, one bold accent color, Fraunces + IBM Plex Mono) which was turned into a static HTML/CSS/JS prototype. Built entirely through a conversation with Claude. Another vibe-coding tool tried first and lost consistency across pages: the footer looked different every time, fonts drifted, even the placeholder photo kept shifting, because each page was generated somewhat independently of the others. Claude held it together by keeping every page on one shared stylesheet and script file, so nothing could drift between them. Only once that static version was solid did it get converted into the actual theme, custom post types, ACF fields, and all, that everything since has been built on.