TODOs — Life After Coding

A running checklist to track site polish, theme customization, and feature ideas.

1) Theme and UI polish

Evaluate built-in themes (current: zephyr)
- Try flatly (clean, professional)
- Try quartz (modern, dark-friendly)
- Try vapor (creative gradients)
- Try journal (academic/long-form)
- Try cosmo (friendly/readable)
Enable custom CSS
- Uncomment css: styles.css in _quarto.yml
- Tweak palette, fonts (Inter + JetBrains Mono), link/hover states
- Unify card/blockquote/button styles across pages

Support light/dark modes

Use separate themes in _quarto.yml:

format:
  html:
    theme:
      light: zephyr
      dark: darkly
    css: styles.css

Improve code presentation
- Set highlight-style: github (or dracula, nord, monokai)
- Enable code-copy: true
- Verify long lines wrap where desired
Navbar/Footer polish
- Add logo or wordmark in navbar
- Make navbar sticky or transparent-on-top
- Footer: add social icons, newsletter, year auto-update

2) Home page and layouts

Home hero section (short intro + CTA to latest posts)
Add a posts listing page with filters/tags
Consistent featured images and excerpts on cards
About page: add profile photo, timeline, skills badges

3) Content model and taxonomy

Tags/Categories: enable and surface on post cards/pages
Create tag index pages and tag cloud
Define post template (front matter scaffold)
Start a “Series” taxonomy (multi-part posts)

4) Images and media

Organize images under images/ and/or posts/<slug>/
Add responsive images (widths, lazy-loading)
Establish featured image guide (sizes/ratios)
Add social preview image template (Open Graph)

6) Analytics, comments, search

Add analytics (Plausible, Google Analytics 4, etc.)
Enable comments (Giscus, Utterances, or Hyvor)
Improve built-in search (check search index size/perf)

7) Accessibility and performance

Color contrast check for text/links/buttons
Keyboard navigation through navbar and TOC
Alt text on all images
Lighthouse pass: Performance > 90, A11y > 90

8) Local dev experience

Fix quarto-preview.js warnings on Windows
- Verify Quarto install (system vs pixi env) and PATH
- Consider installing Quarto via the official installer and use quarto directly
Add VS Code tasks/status bar for common actions
Create a new-post script/task to scaffold posts

9) CI/CD and deployment

Bump actions/upload-pages-artifact to @v4
Keep actions/configure-pages@v4 and actions/deploy-pages@v4
Ensure environment: name: github-pages is present (done)
Add cache steps for Quarto/pipx/pixi if beneficial

10) Documentation and hygiene

Polish theme-guide.md (fix markdown lint warnings)
Add “How to write a post” authoring guide
Add CONTRIBUTING + simple PR checklist (even for solo)

Backlog: content ideas

Life After Coding series (career transitions, identity shift)
Learning logs (weekly/monthly)
Tools I actually use (Quarto, Pixi, VS Code, GitHub Pages)
Deep dives (testing, automation, data viz)
“Now” page and Projects/Portfolio page

Quick wins (pick 3–5)

Turn on styles.css and set highlight-style: github
Add dark mode pairing (darkly)
Create a posts listing page and tag pages
Add social preview image and Open Graph tags
Fix preview warnings and commit workflow bump to upload-pages-artifact@v4