A CSS Makeover

2025-06-15

I finally got around to making a few updates to my website, as you can likely tell. The most obvious of these was replacing my busy dark theme adapted from the tango-dark Emacs theme with a simple light theme. Here’s a screenshot of the old version for comparison:

I’ve been using light themes for everything for the past few years, and it was time to update my website to reflect that. In addition to the site looking better, at least in my opinion, I was able to delete a fair amount of CSS, which will make the site easier to maintain going forward. I also think the new layout should work better on mobile, so it was a win-win-win. I think some of the code formatting especially is still not perfect, but if you notice anything else rendering incorrectly, feel free to email me at the address in the footer.

I should also shout out a few of the websites that inspired the new design. Armin Ronacher’s blog is an obvious and strong inspiration, as well as Doug’s and Andrew’s. I was also inspired by Laurenz’s blog a few months ago, which was one of the initial examples that made me start thinking seriously about this refactor.

The next thing I plan to tackle is further reducing the friction of adding new posts. I recently made things a bit better by using m4 and some scripts to convert from Markdown to HTML more easily, but I’m still not really happy with this setup. In particular, the way I’m using m4 requires me to add a changequote directive at the top of every blog post, even if I’m not using any m4 code in the rest of the post. I’m also getting a bit tired of having to “recompile” my changes for them to show up in the browser, so I’m thinking about adding some kind of file-watching mode to the development server. I’m realizing that I’m reinventing a static site generator, but I guess that’s part of the fun.

Finally, and speaking of fun, if I start messing with the code for the server, I’m going to be highly tempted to rewrite the server in Rust. Go was a formative language for me as a programmer, but I haven’t written much of it in more than 3 years. I much prefer Rust and its tooling now, and use it every day, so if I end up making substantial changes to the server, a language change is very likely too.