General note: This site’s appearance, configuration, hosting, and other basic considerations will change over time. As a result, certain content on this page could be at variance with what you’re currently seeing on the site, but the two were consistent when this post originally appeared.
To those of you who’ve been here before: yep, this is the same site. It just looks considerably different than it did yesterday.
The most notable change is that it’s completely free of “hero images,” even the familiar guy-typing-on-a-typewriter photo that used to grace the home page. Now, the only images you see on this site are those which offer explanatory value (e.g., the one further down on this particular page).
There are other stylistic changes here and there, but they pretty much speak for themselves.
I also took this “housecleaning” opportunity to make the home page more useful to stoppers-by, or at least I hope so. My usual rambling “well-sonny-this-is-how-I-remember-the-early-days-of-the-web” monologue is now where it probably should’ve been all along, which is on the “About me” page.
Why the changes?
So why all these fairly radical adjustments?
They happened because I wanted to recapture a cleanness and simplicity the site once had, even before any of you had a chance to see it.
In recent weeks, I’ve been looking at an old repository which shows how the site looked in its earliest days, back in the late summer of 2018 while it was still in development on my Mac before I actually took it live:
Of course, that was over 100 posts ago and a lot has changed in the interim; but, in the end, I decided that the simpler and cleaner I could make the site look, the better.1
All of this also considerably lowered the site’s download sizes. That’s a win-win.
And that’s the story: short, sweet, and — like the result itself — simple.
By the way: these changes notwithstanding, I’m still using Cloudinary to host the site’s remaining images. I see no reason to change that, especially because I don’t want to go back to keeping those images in the site repo. And the styling is still from Tailwind CSS, as has been the case since last spring — although I did give some serious thought to trying it in the site’s original styling setup, which used SCSS. I chose not to do so because, although I’m trying to simplify, I also don’t want to get too far behind the web dev industry, where Tailwind’s popularity continues to grow. ↩︎