Romain Pouclet

Colorful updates

This image shows a serene coastal scene with two tall, stylized sculptures resembling sail-like structures placed on a rocky shoreline. The sculptures feature bold, abstract designs in shades of white and red. Behind them, calm waters stretch toward a mountainous landscape partially obscured by low-hanging clouds. The overall atmosphere is tranquil, with muted colors from the overcast sky enhancing the peacefulness of the natural setting.

I have used the same theme for this blog for the past few years and it was due for a refresh. While I have gotten pretty good at fighting urges to move to a different platforms, I spent Saturday in cloudy Squamish adding a dash of colour here and there, as well as some new pages.

Massive cleanup

Let’s get the boring out of the way. I mentioned a while ago, as part of me not moving to a new platform, that I’d done a little bit of cleanup on my existing blog. That mostly involved updating some ruby dependencies and fixing what broke in the process. This time, I went a little bit further.

A pull request on GitHub titled improve design with category page with 381 additions and more than 15000 deletions

Honestly, I don’t remember how I setup this blog, because that was more than 10 years ago now. Unsurprinsgly, this repository had accumulated a lot of cruft: leftovers from themes, an old version of jQuery (and its minified versions), some unused image… As you can see, it resulted in a pretty big pull request. It was easy to check if I’d broke something thanks to Netlify’s Deploy Previews.

New Categories

I have never organized my blog in categories because I didn’t think it made sense. After all, I mostly write about programming topics. That being said, when I published the first post about my Comics Outmash project, I wanted a way to share all posts in that serie.

After digging into Jekyll’s documentation, I spent a little bit of time thinking about the categories I wanted and ended up with the following:

  • Programming
  • Writing and essays
  • Continuous Integration & Deployment
  • Comics Outmash
  • Tiny display project
  • Random

Once that was done, I created a dedicated page to list them all and with the help of the Pastel app (which I really like!), I picked a few colours for each category.

It took some head-scratching to list all of the categories and required some liquid template shenanigans but I’m pretty happy with the results.

While I was on designer cloud nine (which is 8 more than I’m used to), I decided to show those categories for each blog post. After some fiddling, I moved the date bellow the title and added the category before the blog post’s title.

Last but not least, depending on the category of the blog post you’re reading, I wanted the theme to reflect it via the links’ colours, the border around the page, and so on. This was a pretty fun challenge for me and gave me a bit of taste for CSS again.

Conclusion

There are still a few quirks to work out, but I’m getting to them as I notice them. Many thanks to Joe who noticed like 50 right away. If you have any feedback, feel free to reach out to me on mastodon!