RSS, GitHub, and SVGs

By Jonathan Lam on 04/16/16

Tagged: the-homework-life the-homework-life-site

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The Homework Life is one step closer to becoming a more widely supported blog with RSS feeds! Now, you can subscribe to the feed by simply giving the link to a feed reader, such as FeedReader. It allows you to easily see the ten most recent posts without having to regularly check the site, and from a feedreader in which you can check all your favorite other blogs and news sources.

The Homework Life has also returned to GitHub at jlam55555/the-homework-life. The full code is there, and I'll be committing to it with any updates I make. It only includes the main site, however— other, side projects are hosted in their own repositories.

Another fancy improvement to the site will be the increasing usage of SVG images. This post image, for example, is one. SVGs have the power to infinitely scale— no zooming will decrease its resolution, unlike most other image formats, which are raster images rather than vector graphics. Try it on the post image, for example: open it on a new tab and zoom! They are defined based on shapes, not pixels, and they are written in plain XML (simple text). Now, although it is still a non-standard web technology, it has widespread support amongst all the major browsers. I've been using Inkscape to create them, and I'd highly recommend it.

Update: Here are some other examples of fun SVGs to create. The cow was created from a PNG image, and the tree was created from a JPG image that was manipulated with Inkscape's Vonoroi Diagram Delaunay Triangulation to create a "low polygonal art" effect. Again, look at their actual sizes (50px by 50px and 40px by 40px, respectively) to see that they really do scale.