date: 'Friday, September 13 2024' title: 'Changes, changes everywhere'

description: 'I made a lot of changes everywhere, and I finally have some time to write about them.'

Changes, changes everywhere

Written by Brenda Zhang

Highlights:

• I made a lot of quality of life updates for myself so I don't have to do as many things manually, allowing myself to be more productive on the things that actually matter in terms of running and growing Insanely Cool Tools. Also general QOL updates for the website user experience. I'll add the bullet points for these in the next section because there's a lot of stuff.

• Added blog categories! As we got more and more blog posts, I realized there are two very clear categories (maybe more in the future) and users should be able to filter by these. There are now Discover and Learn category selectors. Discover is for learning more about new tools and reading reviews of those tools. Learn is for long-form educational articles on various technology and entrepreneuer topics.

• Added various densities (or views) for the tool directory. Just like Gmail and other websites and apps have various densities or styles for viewing information, I created 3 different densities so users can browse and discover new software, apps, and tools in the way that suits them best. There's list, compact, and comfortable. Check it out!

• Updated advertise page to include a website advertising option. Now that the website is in a good state and the improved SEO has increased impressions greatly, I can add advertising options for more than just the newsletter!

More stuff I did:

• Added a better way to read frontmatter so I can autogenerate pages with better SEO titles and descriptions.

• Author pages automatically populate all the posts edited by or written by a specific author based on frontmatter instead of me having to manually update all those every time I publish a blog post.

• Added a hasBlogPost boolean column to the Airtable for each tool and automatically add the line to the tool page that links to an associated blog post.

• Get rid of hydration error that made page load slower and also gave me an error on local dev constantly.

• Improved breadcrumb style. Instead of using slashes as separators, which is not intuitive, I am using arrowheads. Also, set "Home" as the root of all breadcrumbs instead of the whole "Insanely Cool Tools" name.

• Improved the mobile styles overall (breadcrumbs, blog post and tool page margins and spacing, small bugs here and there, text overflows).

• Updated the More Tools section UI. It's now in a cute little purple box with a cute little purple horizontal scrollbar and can display more relevant tools while being responsive and cute on all resolutions.

• Bookmark icon no longer first renders as a 0 which was ugly. Now, it should render nothing before loading and then the bookmark icon right after.

Minor things you wouldn't care much about but I do:

• Replaced pipes with dot unicode as separator between things. More aesthetically pleasing, I think.

• Cleaned up cursor code because it was all over the place with some being default, some being pointers randomly.

• Removed the roadmap page because it's mostly useless right now.

• I've kept up with adding tools from the newsletter issues into the directory because I've set up a great system to do so. Mostly kept up with the blog editing and publishing schedule too! Glad I now have the time for these daily tasks while still improving the website. Without overworking myself!

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