I finally got around to redesigning the blog, or rather, simplifying it. I always liked the deliberate simplicity yet legibile beauty of some tech blogs. And this was also what I was striving for from the very beginning for this blog. If you look at this before/after image you may barely notice any differences.
While not much has changed visually, it was a major cleanup nontheless. Here are some of the things that got axed:
- The Foundation Framework
- A PostCSS pipeline in hugo
- Several 3rd-party JavaScript packages
- NPM
- Font Awesome
- Some custom syntax highlighting attempts
It is now just a very basic Hugo build with some some plain and simple HTML and CSS styling. I am keeping the SCSS dependency, which just makes CSS much clearer to read and write in my opinion.
Instead of trying to be somewhat unique with the EB Garamond font I opted for the clear and straight-forward Open Sans. I still like the EB Garamond a lot, it has something enticing to it. At the same time it has some oddities and it probably takes a better designer to make it “sit just right”. Open Sans on the other hand is just simple and beautiful. It’s almost hard to get this wrong. It’s a “set it and forget it” font.
I also added some minor details like the profile picture in the about page. Fixed and simplified the RSS feed (would you believe, I had a custom feed format for reasons I completely forgot). Remade the icons, which I’m still not happy with. Simplified the HTML and CSS. And some more minor tweaks.
There’s still some more things I want to do. The next thing is a dark mode. Then think about the theme (i.e. colors) again. Maybe add a TOC on the side for posts. Redo the landing page with some parts from the About page. Make better use of tags and categories. Finally fix the icons (their rendering is still somewhat wonky). And some such.
In any case, it should be much less scary to do all these things now. Even in a year from now, when I forgot everything I did and why, it should take me less than an hour to understand everything again and start working.
Oh and yes loading the landing page also went down from >500KB to <200KB, without caching and without even trying to optimize for this yet.