I’ve been tweaking this site since it launched a bit over a year ago: generally small fixes to address odd spacing of various elements, font sizes, and such. Most of those changes are not worth mentioning here. A couple of recent changes I think are worth noting, though, and I’d love your feedback.

Search

Most useful, I think, is the addition of a Search option to the navigation bar. Ghost (the engine that powers this site) has built-in search, but I never exposed it. JAG’s Workshop is rapidly approaching 500 posts, so this should make it easier for you to find a specific post I wrote, or search for a topic (for example, “Apple” or “Politics”). There’s even a keyboard shortcut to bring it up: ⌘K (or Ctrl-K for non-Mac folks). Please try it out.

Fonts

I love fonts. For a while during my days working in desktop publishing in the late ’80s to mid-’90s, I had a massive collection of (mostly legal) fonts. That collection has been lost to the ravages of time, but I can sort of replicate the pleasure of perusing a font book with Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, or FontSpace.

I started with Roboto, but the weights never felt right. I flirted with Inconsolata briefly, but the programmer-friendly monospaced font didn’t fit this text-heavy site. I settled on Seravek as the primary font, partly because it’s a macOS system font and would therefore have no external dependencies for most of my readers.

But it had one glaring issue: the curly quotation marks (“” and ‘’) weren’t, well, curly enough for me. This bugged me to an unhealthy degree. I spent an inordinate amount of time searching Google Fonts for just the right body text, until I noticed that one of the sites I read regularly, Pixel Envy, had “real” curly quotes and the text was very readable.

It was using IBM Plex Sans.

That hurt a bit—IBM, really?—but damn, I like how it looks (in addition to the curly curly quotes, I dig the double-story “a” and “g”), so it’s now the primary body and headline font in my font stack (IBM Plex Sans, Seravek, Roboto, system-ui). Beyond the specific letter forms, I find it’s also more readable on small screens. I’m not a huge fan of its italics (more like slanted or oblique than true italics), and I still need to tweak some spacing issues, but overall I’m pleased with the change.

Call to Action box

A few weeks back I added a call-to-action form to the bottom of each post to drive email signups. The results were… uninspiring. It also felt heavyweight and a bit needy. But, I do want to remind folks they can sign up to receive these posts in email for free (or an optional monthly or annual payment), so I rethought things and landed on a simple text block (which you can see at the end of this piece). I hope this one does better!

In addition to the usual email, RSS, and social media links, there’s also the next addition to the site, tips.

Tips

Ghost has had the option for recurring paid subscriptions for several years now (and I’ve had it enabled since launching this site), but they were, you know, recurring. That can be a turn-off for folks who want to support their favorite creators, but don’t want to worry about being charged every month or year. They may just want to show their support with a one-time contribution, or drop a small thank you for a specific article that was especially valuable to them. Sites like Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-fi, and even Patreon filled the void, but Ghost got its own integrated option a few months back, and I’ve finally enabled it.

Now, if you enjoy an article, or simply want to say “good job!” you can show your appreciation for as little as $1.

Regular, recurring subscriptions remain available to anyone wanting the “perks”: A free subscription gets you a (very) occasional member-only email, and paid subscribers don’t have sponsor/affiliate ads in the navigation bar. All forms of support, paid or not, get my heartfelt gratitude.

Experiments

I’m also exploring various other “member perks.” I haven’t settled yet on what those might be (I’m open to suggestions!) but as an experiment, I’ve updated the Archives page to now include both “Featured” posts and “Linked” posts. Members (including on the free tier) can see and click on any post, and can hide the Linked posts (so it only shows Featured posts—how it was until now). Non-members can see the Linked post titles but can’t click through to them.

This doesn’t actually block anyone from reading those Linked posts, of course: you can use the Search link in the navigation bar to find any article in the list. This is merely a test of the membership system. (I’m also curious whether anyone will become a member just to make it easier to read earlier linked posts.)

What’s next?

I’ll continue to tweak the site often (I’m investigating eliminating the sidebar in favor of a top navigation bar in all orientations so I can have a wider site, for example), but the next significant update will be to Ghost 6. I’m excited about the social network integration feature, especially. The transition will take some planning and downtime, so I’m proceeding very carefully.

Stay tuned for that, and thanks as always for reading.