Back in black

It’s minimal. It’s dark. It’s fun!

What is it, you say? Why, it’s my new website, of course!

I’d been meaning to redo this place for years. A lot has changed in my life, and I might recount them in a separate post. This one’s to commemorate the fourth —and hopefully not the last— version of my personal website.

I hit the sack

What you see1 around here is based on a minimal CSS framework called Sakin. It uses a bunch of new features like cascade layers, nesting and color-mix(). I am happy to say that, as of 2024, writing pure CSS is more feasible than ever.

The title font is Gilbert, modified using FontForge to support more letters. I think this is the second time I did this, and I find it rather fun to “steal” and combine glyphs. Speaking of which, the icons are %100 organic, homegrown products using Figma. You never know what chemicals they use for the ones out there in the stores.

I’ve been too long

I now use Astro to put things together. I decided to choose my battles this time and let go of my own static site generator. Astro is pretty nice, even without using its islands. And the result is almost completely functional without any JavaScript.

Admittedly, I really wanted to reach out for React while making the “stories”. I took that as a challenge and worked it out, using a dash of web components. Still, it’d have been easier with React, and not just because I’m used to it.

I’d say Astro is quite mature at this point, but I did find some details confusing. For instance, the official sitemap integration generates sitemap-index.xml and sitemap-0.xml files by default, regardless of how many entries you have. Or, with the new Content Layer API, you can no longer use the content directory for your content, but you still need to keep the config.ts file there. The API is still experimental though, so we’ll see how it goes.

Since the build process is more complicated than before, I wanted to have a deployment method more convenient than manually transferring the files to the server. The less friction, the better. My first thought was to create a GitHub action. But then I realized, pushing directly to the server might just be enough. So I added the server as an SSH remote to my local repository, and created a post-receive git hook on the server. Seems to be working, for now.

I’m glad to be back

The most significant change in terms of content is the new Projects section. I ended up creating a page for each project, and oh boy, what a trip down the memory lane it was. I read old emails, forum posts, chat logs, source code, you name it. You don’t realize how much you had forgotten, until you remember.

One thing I’m rather proud of is that the new website is considerably more accessible than before. I wrote alt texts or captions to almost all images, added support for high-contrast preference, used more semantic HTML elements, and so on.

Another addition is the RSS feed. I had this back in Blogspot and WordPress days, but did not implement it in the previous version. I no longer use RSS feeds myself to follow blogs, but I believe in the freedom and convenience they provide.

Something I noticed while testing the blog posts was the dreaded link rot (not to be confused with the Lake of Rot, the divine essence of an Outer God). From deleted Wikipedia articles to Google+ posts, the natural decay of web links is everywhere. What’s worrying is that even some big names such as National Geographic did not bother setting up redirects after they changed their URL structure. Are they afraid of regexes? Even I am redirecting my rotten links from ten years ago.

imgur is another service I’d like to mention, not so honorably. Apparently they changed their website so that it’s no longer possible to link directly to an image. Probably makes sense from their point of view, but I lament for the web. There is no escape from enshittification, it seems.

As usual, there are a bunch of easter eggs around the website. I’ll leave finding them to your discretion. I also updated the obscure references random quotes in the footer for a change.

Well, I’m back in black

It’s done, but at what cost? I spent around two weeks for everything mentioned above and more. As usual, it’s the details that took 80% of that time.

If you’re one of the few people who’d been checking this place out after years of nothing, thank you. I hope you’ll find the new look to your liking.

Footnotes

  1. Unless you’re reading this blog post far too late, of course. In that case, hello, visitor from the future! I hope everything’s all right over there. Do we have flying cars yet? ⮥