Changelog

What's been cracking at the lab, written up proper.

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3

Afternoon at t'Lab — Stats Get Useful, Changelog Gets Clever

Couldn't leave well enough alone, could we. After t'morning's graft we came back and gave the homepage a proper going-over — all them stat cards sat there looking decorative, so we wired 'em up. Apps takes you straight down to t'apps row, Suggested Tools does same, and Donations opens Ko-fi like it ought to. While we were at it, each card got a little blurb sat to t'right of the number — nowt fancy, just enough context so you know what you're looking at without having to scroll. That blurb lives in its own JSON file now, updated by hand at end of each session alongside this very changelog, not regenerated every time summat deploys. Changelog page got a fair bit of love an' all — pagination so it doesn't just dump everything at once, a month picker for when the list gets long, and that timeline dot were sat right on top of t'day number like it owned the place. Sorted now. Proper.

  • Stat cards wired up — Apps and Suggested Tools smooth-scroll to their sections; Donations opens Ko-fi; all three show an accent border on hover
  • Stat card blurbs — short summary text sits to the right of each big number, loaded from stat-blurbs.json and updated at end of session, not on every deploy
  • Changelog page now paginates — shows five entries at a time, "Load older entries" reveals more with a fade-up animation
  • Month filter dropdown added to changelog — auto-populated from entry dates, lets you jump straight to a specific month as the list grows
  • Timeline dot alignment fixed — dot now sits exactly on t'line with equal breathing room either side of it
  • Nav link on changelog were showing in purple (browser default) — fixed to inherit the correct colour
  • RSS feed generator updated to handle entries with data-date attributes — were silently producing nowt after we added those
  • About card links tidied — RSS gets its proper icon, Changelog gets a 🗒️, both grouped together on the left instead of spread across t'card
3

Meta Day — Lab Logs Itself, Deploy Stops Dawdlin'

Bit of a funny one today, this — the lab went and built a page about itself. This very changelog got wired up as a proper experiment card on the homepage, glowing away at t'left like it thinks it's summat special. Reight self-referential, that. On top of that, we gave the deploy script a good seeing-to — it were rebuilding every last experiment on every push, even ones that hadn't been touched in weeks. Daft as owt. Now it checks what's actually changed and skips the rest, so pushing a quick tweak doesn't mean standing there twiddling your thumbs while Svelte builds for no good reason. Tidied up the experiment tags an' all — all lowercase, all three per card, proper tidy. And when you click a tag to filter now, it'll suggest related ones right there in the bar so you can keep narrowing down without going hunting.

  • Changelog card added to experiments row — this very page, living on the homepage wi' its own timeline thumbnail and orange glow
  • Deploy script now skips unchanged experiments — checks file modification times, only rebuilds what's actually been touched
  • --force flag added to deploy for when you need to push everything regardless
  • All experiment tags normalised to lowercase and padded to three per card — keeps t'design tidy
  • Tag pills hardened against wrapping — guaranteed single line on every card, every screen size
  • Related tag suggestions now appear in the filter bar — dashed ghost pills showing co-occurring tags, sorted by how many results share 'em
1

100/100 — Dead Crackin' Day at t'Lab

Right then, by 'eck — we've only gone and sorted it proper today. Site's hitting 100/100/100/100 on Google PageSpeed, both mobile and desktop. Champion. Started wi' fonts being a right pain — were loading from Google like we couldn't afford owt better. Got 'em self-hosted sharpish, then found that swap lark were giving us a layout wobble — fair made mi eyes water. Replicate were chucking out thumbnail images four times bigger than they needed to be — dead wasteful, that is. Sorted it all out, tidied up the admin panel while we were at it, and got a nightly PageSpeed checker built into GitHub Actions an' all. Grand day's graft.

  • Hit 100/100/100/100 on PageSpeed Insights — both mobile and desktop. Mint.
  • Self-hosted DM Sans and JetBrains Mono fonts — told Google to do one
  • Fixed a font loading setting that were causing layout shift on first paint — proper sorted
  • Tweaked how the browser fetches site config early — cuts a fair chunk off the load chain
  • Reserved space for experiment cards so nowt jumps about while they load in
  • Fixed AI-generated thumbnail sizing — were coming out four times too big, now right-sized
  • Centralised the experiments and apps list into one place — were hardcoded in five spots before, daft as a brush
  • Admin dashboard now loads experiments dynamically from server — Sound Lab were missing before, reight embarrassing that
  • Built a nightly PageSpeed checker that opens a GitHub issue if owt drops — nearly fully wired up
  • Replicate usage tracker now shows current month's spend, paginated, broken down by model
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