New Year, New Look!

This blog, as it turns out, has been around for a little bit. The UI was feeling its age, and I thought: what better time to update things than the new year? And so, here we are.

I updated the Minimal Mistakes theme that I use to the latest version, and threw out a lot of custom stuff so that I could start over as need be.

The old site has been preserved via the Wayback Machine – what a great org / tool.

What’s Changed?

• Posts now show reading time, which I think is a nice touch.
• The “all posts” page is now nicely organized by year.
• The gross fonts & spacing have resolved themselves by just going with the defaults. I think it’s much more readable now.
• Search functionality! The new theme allows me to use lunr, which is really helpful for putting links together during static site generation.
• The “references” section is gone from posts (for now). This was leftover from my old love of bibliographies, but the links are already in the post and I didn’t get the sense that this would be missed at all.
• I got rid of a ton of extra includes, many of which I wasn’t even using.
• The atom.xml and rss.xml (custom includes) are now gone in favor of the built-in Jekyll RSS generation of feed.xml. If you didn’t see this page in your RSS, re-subscribe! :)
• I’ve added a Credits page to thank those who’ve helped make the site a reality.
• I can use emojis now!

Notes along the way

• It’s amazing how out-of-date a site can get in 3-4 years.
• I no longer have the need to customize like I once did. This theme does almost everything I need to with minimal tweaking, so I think now that I’ve dug out from some of the cruft, I’ll likely keep it clean.
• Remote themes for GitHub pages seem to be the way to go. It was really easy to switch things up without dealing with a mess of files. Deleting things rather than changing things felt good.
• To override files, I just needed to include my own local copy, which I could copy from the source repo.
• I had layouts specified in every post, which tripped me up. Jekyll’s default layouts were definitely the way to go.
• GitHub metadata via Jekyll on GitHub pages is super sweet to experiment with! Loved that it makes things like the credits page and the edit links much easier.

I’d love your feedback!

See something that needs fixing? Have a request? Submit an issue.

Or even better, submit a PR and get your place on the Credits page!