What’s the most logical thing to do when presented with two public holidays, and an unexpected four day weekend? Rather than take time away from my laptop, and refresh my mind, I’m sure we can agree that staying up until the wee small hours working on a new theme for my website has been very worthwhile.
Work is still ongoing, but the benefits of working in public on the final small tweaks more than counterbalance the twitching of my OCD and the likelihood that if I didn’t go live now, the new theme would probably just be sidelined and never see the light of day.
Done is better than perfect, as they say.
There are a few interesting points to note about the new layout:
- Built on the Genesis Framework, because it’s such a clean developer experience. Only two files are required,
functions.phpandstyle.css - Using the Karmina font for site title and headings, and old favourite Proxima Nova for body copy, both from Adobe Fonts.
- Mobile menu toggle added with AlpineJS, which I’ll write about more in the future.
Giving my personal website a fresh look and feel is only really the first step in what I’m hoping is going to be a writing habit that I can build on going forward. In the past seven years I’ve added a total of thirty-six posts, a number I’m quite disappointed by when I look back at the number of interesting projects I’ve worked on, and things I’ve learned in that time.
As part of reworking my website, I’m going to run through each of those posts and make the minor editorial changes needed to fit in with the new layout. Namely adding a new featured image, and writing a custom excerpt.
At the same time, I’m aiming to write and publish on a schedule of one post per week. Not a lot, I know, but I want to take measurable steps towards a writing habit. If I can write more, then great, but I don’t want to add pressure to write and have that result in below par output.
And speaking of below par output, I’ve decided to remove the “Code” section of the site, which I’d used to store code snippets for use in the future. A couple of these have been moved over and retained as blog posts because they were slightly longer form and had proven useful to a few people who had left kind comments, but many were simply one or two lines of code or embedded Gists that weren’t particularly valuable.
Anyway, that’s how my four-day bank holiday weekend has gone so far, with much more still to come, I’m sure!