New Look

 Just a quicky to talk about how I finally got around to changing up the style and layout of the blog.

Since day one I had been using the same default theme without much modification. The original layout looked fine, but I was never especially fond of it for several reasons. For starters, the main colors for the layout were an off-white and the Blogger orange. The featured post at the top of the page was this big block of orange which always gave off Halloween-y vibes to me. The light theme also clashed pretty hard with the dark theme of my portfolio site, which I would expect to be the primary access point for most non-bot blog views. Besides, I personally use a browser extension to turn every website to the dark side, so I wasn't even seeing what the average viewer would see when I viewed my own blog. I'm not much of a visual designer, but even I know that's a no-no.

On to the redesign. For once, I did not torture myself by trying to make something from scratch. I started with a different standard Blogger theme that was closer to what I wanted. It was already a dark theme and had a visual style I liked. I still tweaked it slightly and wouldn't be surprised if I broke some functionality on it, but that's alright. It now visually complements my portfolio site much better without too much effort on my part and I really like the layout.

On the original theme, posts were arranged vertically, with the newest on top, stacked one on top of another. If there are images in the post, it would crop the first one and use it on the side as a thumbnail. Pretty standard and boring. The new theme, however, does things a bit differently. Like the old theme, it grabs the first image in the post and uses it as a thumbnail. But there's no cropping. The thumbnail is a fixed width, but it'll let that thumbnail be as short or tall as it needs to be to maintain the aspect ratio. Then the theme cramps all those posts with their thumbnails into an unaligned grid.

This picture is mainly for the thumbnail

It's cluttered and busy, and it's kind of hard to follow the order the posts are supposed to be in. But I love it. The theme is much more visually oriented, which appeals to me, and the busyness makes it feel like a lot more is going on. Besides, I've never expected people to actually read the blog, so the visual density helps with that first and only impression. As an added bonus, GIFs also work as thumbnails, whereas the old theme would freeze frame them. The only downside to this theme is that text-only posts are pretty lame by comparison, with only a colored box and text. I see that as more motivation for me to upload pretty pictures with my posts.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with this redesign and it has given me motivation to give the blog a bit more love than I had been. More to come soon.