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PERSONALThe Great 2026 Blog Renovation
One of my projects for summer vacation was to completely overhaul the theme of this blog. The last time I changed the theme was in 2023, when I removed all third party CSS frameworks from the codebase, but I was never satisfied with the result. I learned a lot in the process, but my relative lack of experience with modern CSS forced me to use a very simple design.
While the body of the articles was great (and it still is, as it is almost untouched), the home was just a thin, long list of articles in order. However, this website is my home, my Internet-facing business card. A list of articles in chronological order was not the best way to showcase all I do and all I like.
That’s why I dreamed of something richer.
Now that I am better at CSS and we have better tools that help me debug, for instance, why the damn z-index property doesn’t do what it is supposed to do, I felt more confident in my ability to create something more complex. And so this is how I spent my first week of summer vacation.
After sketching different designs, I opted for a magazine-like layout. The last blog article still stands out as a prominent element, but now I have space for more. First, I added a section showing the last articles by topic (I picked four main topics among everything I talk about). Then, there is a more compact section showing the last articles in chronological order.
Most importantly, I added a sidebar for all the rest: a “widget” showing a summary of my /now page, a list of these small bytes/notes articles, a way to subscribe to The ChangeLog, and a list of projects.
Moreover, there are more silly features, such as a way to change color scheme (as I could not decide on one no matter how much I tried) and, finally, a way to search for articles (it is a bit of a hack, given the lack of a backend, but it works).
Everything is still in flux. I will probably shift many things in the coming weeks/months but, overall, I am quite satisfied with the result. Let me know what you think!
In the coming months I plan some more features, more polishing and, why not, Standard Site integration. Stay tuned!
Testing Bluesky-Powered Comments
I am testing a thing. Let's see how it will work.
After seeing many similar experiments, I am testing a way to show and comment on this blog’s articles using Bluesky network. In the best case, it will make the comment section more lively. In the worst case, I would had learned something new.
De-Bootstrapping my Blog - Part 2 - Going Mobile
Or, how I faced my fears and implemented a responsive layout.
I am writing a series of posts about the development of a new blog theme. In the second part, I describe how I conquered my fears, and implemented a responsive layout and a hamburger menu in pure CSS.
De-Bootstrapping my Blog - Part 1
I am writing a series of posts about the development of a new blog theme. In this first post, I talk about the history of web design (in my experience) and the new best thing in town: CSS Grid.
I am killing comments. I will not kill discussion.
I am removing comments from this blog. There are several reasons for this decision. First, it is hard to find value in comments anymore. In 3 years I think I have collected something like 10 comments. Most of my interaction with readers and other people happens on Twitter, in the Facebook comments or in the Reddit threads. Second, the existing main solutions for comments are unappealing.
The default WordPress comment system is very spam prone and hard to manage. On the other hand, Disqus looks like a more technologically advanced solution. Unfortunately, in practice, it is a resource hog, it forces you to have your experience shared among different domains, and, in other words, a giant tracking system. I do not want to force my readers to load a third-party potentially tracking system every time. Even because it make hard to me to enforce a serious privacy policy for this place.