Eddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)So as I mentioned earlier today, I've added a database that keeps a searchable cache of my posts in my website so I don't have to open hundreds of files in order to build the various pages of my website. It's allowed me to move almost all of my pages off of Jekyll and later this month I'll be removing Jekyll from even being on my server. The database as made a lot of things easier, one is that it is now quick and easy for me to create feeds of posts. Right now I have two types of feeds, tag feeds and channel feeds. Tag feeds show all the posts I have created with a given tag. Channels Channel feeds are a bit different, I have two types of Channels: static and dynamic. A static channel isn't too much different than a tag, when I create a post I either manually add the channel to the post or I have a preset rule inside my server that attached the channel to the post. The key to a static channel is that it just shows all the posts that have been assigned to it. The dynamic channels are really where its at. Dynamic channels allow me to provide an id (which becomes the url that you use to access it), a name (which displays at the top), a layout (currently I have 3 types of layouts: Cards, Gallery and Archives) and finally a "query". The query is where the magic is, this is essentially a set of properties that will be passed into the database query. That means I can dynamically, without writing any code (just a config file) create a new page providing it's url, name, layout and some requirements around what type of information I want to display. Articles Archives One thing my new channels has allowed me to do is to create the Archives layout and set up a query that fetches all the articles I've written and display them in a list. It was super easy to set this up because of the way my database cache is working and the way I've configured my channels. I group them by year, then by month and display each article on it's own line. I really like how it turned out. I was heavily influenced by Manu Moreale and the article archive they display on their site. I imagine mine will grow more into it's own design and style over time but everything starts somewhere and I like starting mine based on Manu's work (Thanks for the inspiration!). You can check it out over here, or below is an example of the articles archive as of today The other nice thing is that because my website already supports Dark Mode, on macOS Mojave with Dark Mode turned on, all the colors will automatically invert on this page with no extra work!
