New theme!
I felt like giving this place a new coat of paint. Not sure I'd say fresh. It is a coat of paint. Primarily new paint. Paint which is now on the website.
Look! It’s a new theme! And deranged rambling in the description!
I’m wanting to take a bit more of an active role in posting things to here, which I know I’ve said many a time when social media wasn’t on fire, but that was then and this is the hellscape of the enshittification era. I’ve added a “Sources” tab for things that I rely on for information and entertainment, though it’s not an exact copy of my OPML on Newsblur. I also went through and put a bunch of my Youtube follows into Newsblur, so that I could actually follow them! It turns out I’d been using social media as a way to get notified of lower volume channels actually updating, and, perhaps shocking no one, that means that their uploads would get completely drowned out in a flood of all the shorts that everyone uploads now. Sigh.
There’s some behind the scenes stuff that won’t be noticeable to anyone other than me, as well. I went through and updated the format of the metadata on the markdown files powering the site, put the tags in consistent order, etc. It’ll make it easier to make new posts, because for some reason I’m an idiot and hate using the hugo new posts/postname functionality. Can’t say why, I basically always copy-paste and manually change the header.
Anyway, this is not the final form of the theme, and contact me at the usual ways if you’ve got them and see any huge problems, but I think I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve heard the color scheme is awful, and I will not apologize for thinking it’s pleasant. I’ll update the theme further for compatibility with newer hugo soon, and again when CSS nesting works everywhere without going into about:config on Firefox.
… while writing this, I realize I should change “Modding” to “Projects” and have it as something more generic so that I don’t need to keep adding new sections to the top level of the site. Potentially should do the same thing with a socials page. Well. Nevertheless. I’ll probably tackle that at about the same time as adding JSONFeed support, which I saw shouldn’t be too hard to do. Damn, I should also make sure the description shows on the actual post, maybe as a silly little quote block somewhere. Again, nevertheless.
I miss writing and worry that I’ve lost a bit of my voice for doing so. Just throwing more motivation onto the pile.
the css
I was pretty happy with how easy it is to do responsive design these days! Media queries and CSS variables just being a thing really simplifies the heck out of it. Previously, you really did kind of have to redo the entire site’s styling, over and over, to do something reasonable – or use a preprocessor to do that for you.
Now? Nah, just set all the things you want to change into variables and use those! Manually rewrite only the things that need special care. Works great, no notes.
the hugo theme
This was simple. I grabbed the template repository and wrote the entire thing from scratch, styling included, in less than 24 hours. The single exception was that I did more or less directly use the OpenGraph tag stuff as I’ve seen it elsewhere – I have no idea what matters and at some point I’m sure I’ll look it up and actually do this the right way.
I think the last thing I got working was a custom tags page, and even that wasn’t too bad when I figured out the correct default filename (terms.html if anyone was wondering). Again, I’m pretty happy with the results so far! We’ll see if that lasts.