It’s been a few months since I’ve posted here!

I spent a bunch of time today working on this website. This site started out back in college as a portfolio to showcase my work in hopes that someone might hire me. The portfolio pages haven’t been touched since I graduated, but last year I started writing a few blog posts. I wanted to overhaul the site a bit to simplify, organize, and better position for (hopefully) more future blogging of all sorts, and move away somewhat from the original portfolio purpose.

The most obvious change is the new theme. I’ve been kind of into older, minimalist blogs lately, like https://danluu.com or http://paulgraham.com/ or http://1014.org. They’re absurdly simple compared to all the visual slickness of most modern websites, and I feel a real sense of confidence and timelessness. It’s just a framework for the content.

I like the idea that minimal or even dated design = timeless design. Modern styles look really great too, but I don’t think I have the time/energy anymore to detail out a beautiful website. I just want a simple, usable place for people to read my posts.

I ended up with the Twenty Fifteen theme. It’s not quite as austere as those other blogs, but I think the sticky sidebar is nice for usability. I wish the left sidebar could be independently scrolled, and I want to try to make things more dense (update: improved!), but we’re rolling with this for now.

What it looked like before (Sketch theme):

And now:

The other big, less obvious change: Previously, project pages were “portfolio” pages, which were a different part of the site from the blog posts. Now, those have been converted to blog posts (categorized as Project Writeups), so now everything is a blog post operating under one system of categories and tags. Since the primary purpose of this site is no longer the portfolio, unifying everything under the blog should make future posting/tagging/categorization more manageable.

I also did some cleaning up of tags and added “read more” breaks on long posts.

So basically I made everything look more dated, but hopefully it’s more usable and scalable going forward…