Today I updated the CSS a bit:

  • Improved contrast by darkening the background.
  • Added a green grid background image on the non-blog side (invisible on mobile).
  • Made the blog column responsive (it used to have a fixed max-width of 864px! in 2024! the horror). Now, it has 55% max-width in landscape and no max-width in portrait. It looks a little weird in 4:3 so I could handle that someday, mayhaps.
  • Added a few buttons and a blinkie below the footer. Some of them have links or titles! Check them out!!

And some other things:

  • The RSS feed no longer includes a summary, because I like to read the whole article inside the feed reader
  • The 404 page is in the same style as the rest of the site now

This flexbox tutorial helped me put together the images in the footer.

Upcoming?

There’s still something I’d like to fix: I use hugo to generate this blog, and it generates the 404 page as 404.html, not not_found.html, so I have to move it myself before uploading. I haven’t found a way to make it generate as not_found.html directly.

On desktop, there’s a lot of space on the right side, so I’m thinking about including more visually interesting elements like those fancy sticky notes I’ve seen on other websites. I already like the grid, it’s simple but makes the page feel layered.

I want the blog part to stay sober and easily readable, though.

Since none of this is visible on mobile, I also want to add a separate page to see this content on.

Cutting room floor

I picked the background image out of an old web asset library, and tried a few other options:

A blue tile background from BACKGROUNDS with EMMA.

A printed circuit board background from BACKGROUNDS with EMMA.

A red roses background from BACKGROUNDS with EMMA.

I might still swap to the red roses background someday, but it’s a little heavy. Sadly the printed circuit board image is too bright compared to the rest of the website.