Yesterday I realized that the RSS of my website had been broken. This most likely happened when I briefly experimented with IPFS and had to change all links to relative links and messed around with my configs to make that happen. This spurred me on to also go around to make a few other changes to some aspects of the site that I haven't liked so much.
Firstly, and most notably, I have changed the theme of the website. I used a theme called "hugo-dusk" if I remember correctly, but I made a lot of changes to it, including redoing basically the entire color scheme. However, over time I started liking the theme less and less and it had some overly complicated bits that I would occasionally edit out.
So, this morning I decided that I'd check if I could find a simpler theme to use and found one in the form of "photophobia". This theme is pretty simple and minimalist and it also has a nice feature of suggesting related articles at the bottom of posts, which is quite neat. I did have to make some changes to it as well, like strip out all of the complicated Tailwind CSS stuff and the JS-based development workflow. I basically just copied the resulting CSS from Tailwind and reformatted it and stuck it right back into the main CSS file. It's not pretty, but it allows me to quickly make edits without calling "yarn" every time.
I also made the decision to go for a theme that produces coherent HTML pages without mandatory JavaScript. There was a cool looking theme that emulated the look of a terminal, but it uses a JavaScript library to type out the text and that would break the site when JS is disabled. My aim remains to keep the site usable on browsers like EWW and NetSurf and thus I need my site to be constructed out of static HTML. I have also made some changes to the stylesheet to accomodate NetSurf and now the site looks pretty good there too. If you happen to use these types of browsers and run into usability issues let me know.
There is still some work left to be done adapting this new style. First of all, on mobile the page seems to stretch in weird ways, so I will need to look into what is causing that. Secondly, the current way I am doing the VOD archive is no good due to causing massive delays in building the website. I'm planning on moving that stuff to a separate web app developed in Rust both to smooth out the website building process and also the VOD uploading process.
I'm hoping that you enjoy the new website theme and how the website functions. For now I'm quite happy with it, but I'll probably tinker with it every now and then to change some things here and there. Sometimes I really wish the web was as simple as Gemini though, that way I wouldn't even have to worry about anything but the basic markup of the website. Oh well. You can find me on Gemini too, by the way.
>> Home