Been working on my site the past couple of weeks. Some user-facing changes, some backend changes solely for me (well, isn’t it all for me, being my personal website that’s mostly just visited by bot crawlers?). I love tinkering on computer stuff, but computers are largely bad these days. But a simple, static website on the other hand is not bad, it is fun, it is good, and it brings me back to my early days: I made my websites by hand starting in 1998 when I was roughly 10 years old until about sometime in college when I didn’t have the attention span to maintain a site anymore. Getting back into it five years ago though has been huge for me :)

I’ve also decided that this might be a living post for a little bit.

changelog

August 15th 2026

• Changed tag page to sort tags alphabetically instead of by post count

August 12th 2026

• Consolidated layouts and logic such that the page that shows posts by tag (i.e. any tag linked on the tag list) will now use the exact same layout code as the archive page.
  • I’m actually really proud of this one, especially that I had inadvertently set it up to be extremely easy to reuse the archive code. good habits never die :)
  • this allows me to clean up even more redundant layout and include files :)

August 11 2026 and earlier:

• stopped using Fira Sans font
  • i finally realized that it’s (probably) more readable to use the base sans serif fonts on your workstation
  • no longer pulling font data from another web source, all fonts are defined generic and are pulled from the user’s device
    • except for monospace fonts: if your device has the Comic Mono¹ font, it’ll be used for any monospace fonts, else your system’s default will be shown
• added badges to the index page — I just think they’re cute :)
• added no ai usage line to footer of all pages
• better image handling
  • images are no longer centered horizontally and no longer set to display: block. These changes allow more than one image per line
  • fixed some theme-supplied css that prevented me from setting image height per-post via css — now I can normalize the size of photos with different aspect ratios, especially when displayed on the same line
  • this will be a big help as I post more photo posts
• set up my jekyll templates and directories so i can view rendered drafts more easily when building my website in a test environment, without posting them to the public site
  • this involved moving all drafts that aren’t anywhere near completion into a __ultradrafts folder and then applying dates to anything remaining in the _drafts folder that I am actively working on
  • also slapped big old “DRAFT” labels on the posts in the list views and in the post view
• cleaned up unused includes and layouts as well as unnecessary css/sass bullshit; identified others that could be cleaned
  • continuing to pare down file count from aborted experiments and from the base theme so that my website is smaller and builds faster (current build time is less than 3 seconds on my laptop and less than 9 seconds with upload on the NAS, but still)
• removed now page, removed broken rss for now page
  • part of me is contemplating bringing it back and just making it a “current video games” and “current tv show” page, but I know I’d fail to keep it up to date and I would just feel bad about that. my own website should not make me feel bad!
• experiment: decreased the size of the pinned posts list, dunno if i like this yet
• better organized images at the filesystem level
• archive page updates:
  • added jump links by year
    • eventually I’ll need to generate archive pages by year instead of one large page, but that’s a tomorrow problem
  • added post count per year
  • cleaned up erroneous line breaks and spacings
• simplified the projects page to be a list sorted by project type
  • I also have the option to sort by the platform on which the project runs if that’s something I would prefer to do in the future
  • this required a pretty heavy rework of that page for… two headers and three whole bullet points 😅 But it was fun, damnit! 😤