It's been a long time coming, but I've finally updated my blog's design. I've also moved off of Hugo to 11ty; rather than use a pre-made theme, I wanted to build my own. I've liked the Hugo Base16 theme that I've used for the last few years, and wanted to keep some aspects of that aesthetic.

I had specific goals for a new site design (and I'm still tweaking this; it'll be a bit yet before I'm satisified). First, I wanted a wider content area; I often post code snippets and don't want them wrapped as aggressively as the previous design demanded. Second, I wanted something using (relatively) simple CSS and JS; I'm not a front end expert anymore, though it's a weakness I am working to overcome. Third, I wanted something that was light-mode dominant, at least for now; my middle-aged eyes don't like dark modes as much as they used to. When I have time to develop the site further, I do plan on adding a light/dark toggle that respects the user's system setting, but right now I'm aiming for MVB.

I did get mileage out of GitHub Copilot to assist me with some of the CSS and HTML; I've not worked with Flexbox or CSS gradients much, so it helped me figure out what I needed to do, as well as with some of the "calculator for words" tasks that AI is (sometimes) good at. I will note that I write all the content here, though I sometimes use AI tools to as a poor man's editor and ask if I covered all the major points I wanted to. I used this approach in my captioning post and actually got a few useful suggestions out of it.

The actual choice to abuse the heck out of CSS gradients is entirely on me, though...

At any rate - I have more tweaking to do, but I'm really happy with this start, and it lays the groundwork for me to move to a lower-capability hosting solution; Dreamhost has served me well for nearly 20 years, but it provides more capabilities than I need or want.