I spent the day overhauling the plugins that I use with the site. Once I get all of that done, I should have an easier time tweaking website functionality, not just its look and content.

The goal is to do the following:

  1. Provide a way to show the last time a story was modified. This will create some transparency around when a story gets edited, how, and why. It does so without me needing to do any work besides programming the plugin and editing stories as necessary.
  2. Improve the way in which assets (primarily images) are included in stories. This will solve a problem that I have on my own website, where the images are so big (because I like to hold on to the original quality ones) that it makes pages load slowly. I can just drop in full-quality images, and the computer down-sizes them while maintaining and not touching the original.
  3. Make naming posts easier. I usually don’t come up with the name of a post until it’s done because sometimes I include multiple stories and sometimes I include one. Plus, I try to avoid coming up with headlines for stories until I have finished writing the story. This plugin will allow me to use placeholder names and automatically rename as I am about to publish the story.
  4. Make listing documents easier. I am supposed to get a request to my GRAMA request for HDHO-related emails next week. I want to organize those into folders with dates to make it a little easier to read through them. It would be nice to have a way to automatically list and link to files associated with a post so I don’t have to list them all by hand.
  5. Support logical plugin notation. This is in the weeds, but I basically need to have a way to parse Liquid tags in a logical way. I want named arguments with plugins, and they are all going to follow the formula of {% plugin_tag arg1="a string literal" arg2='another literal' arg3='420.69' arg4=variable %}.

Easy.