I recently redesigned my website, so I figured I’d write an update to the original “Hello, World!” post.

My blog’s new theme is inspired by Adam Johnson’s blog. I don’t actually know anything about Adam or his blog, but I happened upon his blog and really liked the design. I liked the minimal, clean look. I also liked the monochromatic colorscheme as well as the vertical layout, both of which lend themselves to easy maintenance. A monochromatic colorscheme means less colors that I need to tune, and a vertical layout makes it much easier to create a responsive webpage that looks good on all devices.

Something that I wanted for the redesign was separate categories for my different hobbies. I thought it would be cool to use a different colorscheme for each category. To implement this, I took inspiration from Jekyll’s default theme Minima, which has several different colorscheme options. By looking through Minima’s code, I learned how to use Sass.

I ended up also using some other features that Minima implemented. If you compare my theme with Minima, you might spot the similarities. The most interesting (and least obvious) one is vertical rhythm. Basically, a webpage with vertical rhythm keeps its vertical spacing consistent by ensuring that all text rest on an imaginary grid, sort of like writing on college-ruled lined paper.

One big reason why I redesigned my website is that I was unsatisfied with the original theme that I had created. You can see what it used to look like through the Wayback Machine. I really love vim and the terminal, so I made design choices that were inspired by vim and the terminal, but aren’t actually good for webpages. For example, monospace fonts are good for the terminal because it’s useful for lines of code to line up, but it’s not the choice for a website which should prioritize readability of English. Also, it’s useful for vim colorschemes to have lots of different colors because there are many different types of key words to distinguish when editing code, but too many colors just looks jaring on a website.

After learning about the various types of colorschemes, I decided to use monochromatic colorschemes because:

  1. they are easy to get right
  2. they work well with a minimalist layout
  3. it’s easier to come up with many monochromatic colorschemes for my various different hobbies.

Finally, the inspiration for the actual colors I chose come from Nord.

TODOs for the future:

  • Add the ability to comment on posts. I don’t want to use a third-party commenting service because I want to completely self-host my website, so I’ll probably need to set up a database.
  • Color-code the various posts on the front page. Right now, it’s pretty hard to tell what category each post belongs to without clicking into them.