CSS is hard to tackle piecemeal

Jun 21, 2022

Tonight I tweaked the markup and fiddled with the tailwind classes on bookshelves.dev to get the featured items on the homepage to bother me less.

Since they look like cards, I wanted the whole thing to be clickable. But wrapping the existing markup in an anchor tag of course messed with the colors and text-decoration, so I had to track down how to extend the tailwind.config. Then I wanted some subtle hover animation and finally feel better about that. I liked it enough to implement it for the card component layouts of the shelf and book shortcodes across the site. Along the way, I also eliminated a couple of things that were wonky at intermediate breakpoints.

Overall I still feel really unhappy with the clunkiness of the visual design and the haphazard feeling of the markup and the chaos of tailwind classes. But it hurts me a little bit less.

I sure wish I had time to go deep on the css from scratch. But there are other things I really want to be doing on the site right now. Fiddling with these little things is a luxury I don’t often afford myself lately.