vados 0.3.0: dates, feeds and fewer scripts

What changed since 0.1.0, and what this blog no longer needs

A round brick fort with small arched windows and a grass-covered roof, seen across a field of tall green grass, with trees behind it and a few visitors on the path to its left under an overcast sky

Three weeks ago I wrote that vados finally had a command line. Since then there have been two releases, 0.2.0 and now 0.3.0, and the second one is the one that made this blog simpler instead of just bigger.

Before the release I did a dry run: I built the unreleased code and generated this blog with it next to the old version, then compared the output. That turned up a surprise in my own setup. Half of what the blog needed from scripts around vados is now vados's job, so those scripts are gone.

Writing a blog

A page can now have a date, and a section can list its pages by it with childOrder: dateDesc. A new post shows up first without renumbering anything. Until now I gave the newest post the lowest order and ran a Python script to rebuild the cards on the year page and the home page. That script is deleted. The home page now just says "latest": { "from": "/tech", "limit": 4 }, and a page can show the newest dated pages from anywhere on the site.

The same dates drive Atom feeds. Set "feed": true on a section and vados publishes feed.xml with every post's summary and full content. For now a feed lists only the direct children of the page it is on. On this blog the posts sit one level down, under the year, so the feed lives at /tech/2026/feed.xml. I'd like it to look deeper, as latest already does.

Being found

  • Link previews: og: and Twitter tags, canonical URLs, and a 1200×630 JPEG crop of the page's image, because LinkedIn doesn't reliably show WebP.
  • sitemap.xml and robots.txt, structured data for search engines, and the rel="me" and fediverse:creator tags Mastodon uses to verify you and credit you under a link.
  • Every title now ends with the site's name, and every page has a proper <h1>.

Most of this needs one new line in main.json, the siteUrl, which is also why vados check now warns when it's missing.

Faster pages

Icons used to come from the Material Design Icons web font: about 400 KB of render-blocking CSS and font for a handful of icons. In 0.3.0 they're inlined as SVG. This blog used to run a Node script after every build to cut that font down to the icons I used. That script is gone as well. The hero image is fetched early, every <img> has its dimensions, and on phones the tiles and social icons no longer fight over the same space.

Code blocks in Markdown are highlighted at build time now too, with a small stylesheet that is only linked on pages that have code.

Between 0.1.0 and here

0.2.0 added a site description and a favicon, and the text vados puts on every page (skip link, navigation labels) now follows the site's language: English, Dutch, German, French or Spanish. It also fixed the breadcrumb announcing "page" instead of the page's title.

cargo install vados

If you read this blog in a feed reader, you can now subscribe. That was the last thing it was missing.

This blog is built with vados, too, and now with 0.3.0.

Photo: Fort in the grass, by me. Thick walls, small windows and nothing running inside: roughly what I want from a static site, too.

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