Colorful updates
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.
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!