Redesign!

I have redesigned my website! I'm sure you've notice already. But I decided to redo my theme, site structure, and even how I publish and build my site.

The technical side of things is probably the more interesting part of this post and I want to write that post but I don't really have the time yet.

Theme

I love my new theme. I have a dark and lightmode theme (using a @media query) which both were in part inspired by my emacs theme “moe-theme.el”! They're both soft on the eyes and using some colors I love. I liked my old structure but I found it to be a bit… pre-transition. I am much cuter now and I wanted my site to reflect that!

kuanyui/moe-theme.el

Move slow and break things

This was a long time coming. I'd been working on this redesign for weeks; most of it coming in my build process. But because I am writing HTML (and gmi) posts to be generated into a complete page at build time rather than at post time, I made the effort to change my URLs around.

Before I was posting to /blog/{iso-date}/index.html which I regretted immediately. Now that post would be /blog/{year}/{month}/{day}/{post-title}.html which is way more shareable! I could probably do some mangling in my nginx to restructure any request to /blog/{iso-date} to at least pull up the index for that date (that's right! I finally got index pages!).

Because the new URLs my RSS feed has basically regenerated itself anew and you'd likely see double posts as it republished all my old posts as well as this one.

Trying out gemtext first, as an option

This post was written in gemtext and built to HTML to be published. That required a small modification to my build script. I realized there are some posts that I feel do require to be "html first".

This turned out to be a lie (sometimes). I think what I meant was "technically" going from HTML → gemtext is easier to rationalize technically. When going from gemtext → HTML it's simple and straightforward but then "how do I do things not supported by gemtext?!" Which is where my brain got locked. I want to share some music; I have a very particular style for that, I'd have to custom write a whole generator for detecting music links and restructuring it etc etc. Where as going from HTML → gemtext I can just yank the link out and call it a day.

So a hybrid approach is where I'm going to leave it. A regular text first post like this is gemini first. An HTML post can be there when I need to make sure the webview renders a certain way! And I think that flexibility is best!

Conclusion

So yeah! Sorry for the 1 person who subscribes to my RSS feed for breaking it. And I hope you like the new theme! If you default to darkmode themes toggle the light mode in your devtools! It's really cute too!

— Steph