Another Redesign

There’s something poetic about people with my habits. I enjoy building the infrastructure for my new projects then leave it to rust, never finishing my work. Endless domain names bought, containers spun up, grand ideas jotted down, then little actually done to develop them.

So it is with my blog. I’ve always wanted to be an active blogger. I spend a large part of my life thinking about the things I’d like to write, framing them as blog posts, yet I rarely ever actually sit down and write them. There’s always something getting in the way, sometimes in the tumult of my life, sometimes in the tech I’ve implemented.

The result is that I end up redesigning my blog almost as often as I post on it. Oops.

This time was to remove some of that stickiness though. I had great plans for a photography blog when I started this last time around, with each post requiring a header photo and tons of elaborate complexity in the backend to manage photo uploads. That led to multiple instances where posts stayed stuck on my disk, in my notebook, or in my head waiting for me to make appropriate photos to pair with them.

I admit that’s largely due to a lamentable decline in my love of photography. I used to go to every protest I could, but I’ve barely been to a handful these last few years, and my street shooting has reduced to virtually nothing. When I shoot nowadays, it’s with my dodgy old film cameras and instant film at parties and such.

I’m not done with photography by any stretch, and I still hope to get back to where I was, but it’s not my focus anymore and not the focus of my website.

This redesign therefore was about making things more text-focused. I want to write more and centre the writing as the primary content here rather than images. I’ve gone back to a light-mode theme, improved the contrasted colours for easier reading, and adopted some new fonts. The layout is largely the same, but with some changes to the home page to reframe text posts without images. Things also scale width-wise there now — I’m not sure if this is good practice, but anecdotally it seems like everyone browses full-screen on laptops nowadays.

There are some things lacking. Firstly, dark mode. I’ll look at a toggle for that soon. Secondly, my old post on my tech setup is broken, with the PNG images I’d drawn not working with this lighter theme. I’ve thought about recreating them but having theme-specific images feels wrong. I think I’d rather move to SVG images and style them accordingly.

Anyway, the main thing here is to get me back writing again. There’s so much going on that I want to express my view on in a longer form than my Mastodon posts. Henceforth, I’ll aim at a much more rapid pace to my posting — and refrain from any inclination to redesign everything yet again.