New site theme

This July, I was designing a theme for a short story that’s not yet published and possibly never will be. At some point, it became apparent the story’s custom theme was better than the default in all ways that mattered. This made me go ahead and spend a few evenings changing how some parts of the site were formatted and rewriting the whole main stylesheet.

The most obvious change is the new navbar, which adds a splash of colour and allows for further customisation. I try to keep everything minimal and easily modifiable so that custom themes are easy. If you’re seeing this in the winter, the star may have turned into a snowflake!

This also lead to some structural reworks. For example, about had dedicated colophon and contact pages split off of it. This was also another opportunity to take a second look at some past articles and drafts.

In general, my love for themes has lead to more and more improvements in this regard. There is now support for site-wide themes (great for various holidays), disabling all stylesheets except the page’s, and more. I just enjoy working on styles; whenever I see an interesting element on someone else’s personal page, I write it down or see if I can implement something like it. If I have an idea, I do the same.

My page is still relatively minimal – and I hope it will remain so – but over the years nice features have accumulated. The theme you’re reading this through likely isn’t the one I’m writing about right now – times change. But it’s probably still built on its shoulders.

This work on CSS is a never-ending endeavour. Just a few days ago, I fixed footers on tall screens and decided to make the text appear justified on larger ones, which looked better to me. I like to think this tinkering helps me sharpen CSS skills.