A New Look

After many years using Aditya Telange’s wildly successful PaperMod theme for the Hugo static site generator, it’s time to spread my wings and make my own theme.

Hence, by writing this post, I am launching a new look for my (this) blog.

This theme definitely isn’t perfect, and it’s very likely that various tweaks will be required.

But it’s probably acceptable in presentation to be pushed out to the world. After all, perfect is the enemy of good.

And I want to be okay putting things out there that are good enough.

Why?

The old look:

Some might think the old look is better. And they’re probably right. It’s a great theme.

However, lately, I’ve been thinking about technology independence, technological malaise and sharing ideas (I’ll expand on this in a promised future post).

I normally put musings on big platforms like Twitter and Instagram, and longer musings on YouTube.

Then, I peer at the analytics and weep over the lack of engagement, which discourages me to share.

Most of what I say just gets lost in a vacuum.

Then, I thought about this blog. Why not write on here? Express myself. Throw away the analytics and write. Write even though nobody is reading. Write because that’s what the soul wants… no needs.

This made me want to redo the theme to something more unique, represents me, something I’m proud of - which all culminates in an excitement to write and post on here again.

I simplified the layout: a small excerpt lives above my most recent posts in a list format grouped by year.

Blog cover images (equivalent to youtube thumbnails) have been removed. This pushes the focus onto the writing and doesn’t block me from posting because I can’t find an image.

The headings are in the brilliant Optician Sans font created by ANTI and Fábio Duarte Martins for those Optometry vibes. The rest of the fonts are from GitHub’s monaspace, specifically Xenon for prose and Radon for code snippets.

Here is the look so far:

Hopefully, this will encourage me to write. This blog will act my private yet public musuem. It won’t get many readers, but for anyone who discovers it, hopefully to them, it’s a gold mine. So, I’ve withheld on analytics and tracking.

Feel free to let me know what you think. Anyway, thanks for reading.