2022-02-10

New year, new... website redesign.

I’m finally back… and the whole website now looks different! And we’re also CC-BY-SA + BSD-2-Clause open source (see bottom of page)!

To be honest, I’ve been meaning to write some more posts about some of the random bits and pieces I found when working on various things, both at work and personally. I do have a list of things to write up about! But, I guess I hold myself to too high of a standard, and don’t really want to write blog posts that are too short and don’t ‘properly’ convey a point. I’ll work towards putting that aside and posting more this year – more to come (hopefully).

So, why the redesign? Well, I was always pretty unhappy with the homepage. As I was shifting more towards a simplistic, more document-like website, which is viewable as a page (not as a design piece(?)), the more I really didn’t like the vertical and horizontal centred div element. Now I’m a lot happier, and we are back to a light theme (haha). On the Jekyll side, I’ve also consolidated all of the site into one nice, neat layout – hooray! Again, I am just leveraging it as a simple templating system that works on GitHub Pages – I just need something to copy and paste repetitive elements for me.

As for the layout and design, I was inspired by David Malan’s website and Drew DeVault’s blog. Just a plain layout, with a navigation-sort-of static bit on the left, and the content on the right. I am no UX designer, so coming up with my own novel ideas is not my field, but I have to say I’m pretty happy with the result. If there are any accessibility issues though, please let me know! I would love to improve this area; it is actually a goal of mine to ensure it is so – half so more people can access the page easily, but it also is fun to remain fully compatible!

On the compatible part… this is why I love just keeping it simple. All too many times, especially for a simple portfolio*-ish* page like this, we’re pulling in React, Vue, etc. That isn’t my intention and I love quick, snappy pages that get to the point and just load. Hey, this website is perfectly usable on a text-based browser, look!:

Pretty awesome, right? Well, here it is on Windows 98 SE, Internet Explorer (not perfect, but very usable):

…and also on a Nintendo 3DS (yeah, I know this is actually decently modern, lol):

Hope you enjoyed those glimpses into my irrational obsession with keeping my website accessible on almost anything. I am looking into Gemini and/or Gopher, and will see if I can use Jekyll to auto-generate these posts on there too – I think it’d be pretty neat just as an alternative protocol, because what even is the web in 2022? (I think I’m just sick of the Wéb-Three talk everywhere… :< look I’m trying to avoid mentioning it just in case…)

Anyways, I’ll really be trying to post more this year!