Deep Links

I tried to find a good funny reference to Jack Handey here but failed. Which might be a good thing given how the reference likely shows my age…

I have been working on various bits of the site as well as finishing up a long-overdue article. I’ve also been giving some thoughts in general about interesting ways to move forward with some ideas which I will bore you all with shortly.

Deep Linking

A while back I had some thoughts around how best to format long form articles. I finally decided to keep articles entirely on a single page as opposed to breaking them up across multiple pages. Mostly this was because I know I personally hate having to click through too many times just to read an article, and the technique is often used as a cheap means to show more ads to readers.

The problem with single page articles is linking/referencing content at an arbitrary location in the page. The markdown processor I’m using in metalsmith does add a unique heading id to each html heading element, but doesn’t expose the link easily.

So I spent some time recently writing a small metalsmith plugin to do that for me. In the articles you can now get a direct link to a heading section by hovering the mouse pointer over a heading. The link will become visible at the end of the heading (as a link icon):

This lets you now link directly to that section. So I can now link directly to content deep into the page itself, like this link to the Nikki example for skin retouching.

These are the same heading links that are used for the Contents navigation pane on the menu:

This method of exposing a heading link is similar to what you may find on GitHub for instance. So, at least there’s now the ability to deep-link into articles as needed! :)

Skin Retouching with Wavelets

Also, I took a break from this other thing I’m working on to finish writing the Skin Retouching with Wavelet Decompose article.

This poor article has been in the queue for what feels like forever, so it’s nice to finally be able to publish it. This particular article is a combination of many of the previous things I had written around using wavelet scales for retouching work. If you get a chance to read it, I’d love to hear what anyone has to say about it!

Articles Index Page

I’m still experimenting with the look and feel of the articles index page. If you follow that link you’ll see one of the ideas I currently have for laying it out. I’m not 100% sold on this layout yet, as it may get cumbersome with many articles at once.

I may also provide links at the top of the page for particular content (tutorials, showcases, by tag/software, etc…).

Speaking of which, I’m wondering from a content management standpoint if it makes more sense to publish every item on the site as an “article”, then to handle the categorization and display as a function of tags/categories on the posts. Not quite sure just yet. I’ll still need to fiddle with some other layout/organizational ideas.

On Another Note

I finally also fixed the path problem when generating the blog post listing page. I had a problem where locally referenced images for a post (relative to the post directory) didn’t have their paths updated when showing them on the blog index page. So I took some time and repaired it with a small handlebars helper function.

For instance, the Deep Thoughts image at the beginning of this post wasn’t showing correctly from the blog index page before I fixed it.