I love to tinker.
I change things with my life around constantly. I wouldn't say that I'm indecisive, per se, but I do always find myself on the lookout for different things, especially when it comes to anything tech related.
A great example: in my office, I currently utilize Hue Bulbs, allowing me to set the temperature dynamically throughout the day, as well as control them remotely. However, there's one drawback - nobody can touch the light switch, for any reason. If it's off, then the lights don't work. Suck!
When we re-did our basement at our last house & turned that into my office, one of the things I did was ensure that the contractor installed a Lutron Caseta dimmer switch for the lights. Not only could I now control on/off + brightness remotely, but anyone could when they touched the switch. Plus, the switches are much cheaper than the bulbs. It worked perfectly.
So now, I'm here pining to return to "the old days"[1], wishing I had my Caseta switch back.
One of the wonderful parts of participating in Weblog Posting Month (WeblogPoMo) has been the opportunity to tweak my site to modify a ton of things that had either bothering me for ages, or I just saw and thought "ooo yeah, ok!"
Ultimately, everything I did recently has been in the service of readability; I try to leave the flash and flair for non-important moments (save the final change), and make this a more enjoyable site for you to look at & read.
Here's a non-exhaustive list of all the changes I've made over the past 26 days:
- Updated the header colors; gone is the plain white text, now it has a bit of color (also the "
(me)" was, in my humble opinion, a fantastic touch). - Mastodon and RSS images/links now live in the header.
- Fixed my Littlefoot footnotes so they worked properly. On the home page, they'd often get crossed up with other posts on the page. (Shout out to Robb for the assist there.)
- Changed the default font & font size. The base font is now whatever your device thinks it should be for your own legibility. The font sizes are generally a bit larger[2], and they also scale dynamically with device size (if you're on desktop, shrink your window down; you should see the font change as you do).
- Updated font colors, link colors, and more. The base font color was made a bit thinner, and the color was modified to add some extra contrast. Emphasized, bolded, and embolded text got even more contrast to truly stand out. Links got the same treatment, going from all orange to white + orange underline. Hopefully this makes things pop a bit more.
- Updated the background color. I'd been using a cool, subtle gradient before, but this was causing some issues on mobile, and making for an inconsistent reading experience. Bye bye.
- Updated my URL scheme to remove the trailing
/from every link. That annoyed me. - Built specific pages for post archives (to go along with the pre-existing categories), my app defaults, and uses.
- Updated my About page to be more about the past, my Now page to be more focused on the present (& dynamic, sucking in the latest appropriate blog post), & my Hello page to be more specific to contacting me.[3]
- Made the dividers between posts on the home page more prominent.
- Fixed the cosmetic footer to be anchored in place for mobile users (sorry, Whatsie).
- Added color to my list markers to make them stand out.
- Indented ones have their own color too!
- Added an entire template to handle displaying images with captions, specifically for my post about hats.
- Last but not least, as I wrote this post, I updated my post links to have a cool gradient on hover. Go on, give it a try.
Hopefully all of these changes are well received. If you don't care for any of them, be sure to let me know why it doesn't work for you. And if you have anything you think I should add, let me know that too! I'm always up for more changes.