I’ve been getting a little sick of how busy my front page was with post excerpts and post metadata. I see other blogs that just have a simple list of recent posts and I realized that’s what I wanted on mine too. Going back twenty four years I’ve always put at least an excerpt on my blog’s front pages so I kinda think I was just in a pattern. It feels very weird to break this pattern, but I think patterns can be okay to break sometimes. This also brings the main page visually in line with the archive page and I also like that on most computers now the front page does not require any scrolling! I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the projects page as it still uses the excerpt format, but the metadata and brief description there might kinda make sense for that purpose.

A neat side effect is that this change no longer requires me to write in a way that centers an excerpt to be displayed on the front page. My rss feed already delivers the entire post content to rss clients, so excerpts were already largely not needed and now they’re just fully unnecessary! Feels like a small bit of creative freedom in a way.

There’s still so much more to be done. I want to drastically simplify the CSS/SCSS/SASS (whatever it’s called), the HTML, and especially the liquid templating so much. I’ve already started on it a little bit while working on this. These changes won’t have any visible effect whatsoever as I currently intend to largely keep the feel of my website intact, just really simplify the backend and thus build process of it (not that building takes long at all..). It feels really good to start making some movement on this as it’s been a bother for a long time. I also want to finally implement a dark mode css theme, probably based off of how the Dark Reader chrome extension makes my site look. I just don’t know yet how to extract Dark Reader mode into css.

I originally just pulled in the Basically Basic jekyll theme as a ruby gem, but as my needs have changed over the years I had to then pull those layout and include files directly into my website directory to make modifications. A few weeks ago I fully moved everything into the project directory and told jekyll to stop using the gem whatsoever. My needs and desires have just changed a bit from the original purpose of that theme I think and it’s time for me to have my own thing going on. I like some of what BB gave me so it makes a good starting point. I will not be releasing a jekyll theme. I do not want to maintain anything for public use or be on the hook for any bug fixes for anyone else. This is just for me and my site :)