My last big update to the blog was back in April. Since then I've been quietly adding small things here and there, nothing major. But today I decided it was time to do a full redesign.
Here's the why behind it. My header, feature area, and subscribe box were all painted in heavy navy blocks, one after another. It's not that blue is too much — I still love it — but this is an indie web blog, and I want it to feel simple. Easy to navigate. Something you can read leisurely without any noise getting in the way.
I wanted the blog to feel lighter and more open, something pleasant to move around in. Cleaner. Maybe minimalist, though I'm still not totally sure that's the right word for it.
So this time, I went lighter. Clean, simple colors, and a few small animations to give the site some life without going overboard. It feels fresher already.
One bigger change: I dropped the pill-shaped morphing nav. That one was short-lived — I just wanted to see how it looked for a while, but in the end I decided to go back to a sticky header like before.
The one change I kept: the logo now quietly hides itself as you scroll down, while the header itself stays put. It also shows my avatar and site logo together, and has icons in the nav now. That avatar is a new one too — updated both on the blog and in my Micro.blog account settings.
I also redesigned the logo itself. Glasses now replace the two e's in "Geeks," and "Out!" tilts up slightly with a terracotta underline underneath.
I also redid the home page. No more pagination — it just shows the 5 or 6 most recent posts, then you head over to the archive for everything else. Longer posts now fade out near the bottom once they pass 800 characters, so you get a taste and click through to keep reading. On mobile, there's a bottom nav bar now instead of a hamburger menu, and on the home page it just stays put as you scroll.
The archive page now lets you expand and collapse categories instead of scrolling through one long list. And on the subscribe side, I added RSS as an option on the home page strip, right alongside email — single posts now have their own subscribe block with that same choice too.
On single posts, I redid the post titles. I had updated them not long ago, but I wasn't happy with how they turned out, so I built a better version this time. I also decided to drop the background block that used to sit around the title — now it just blends into the same background as the rest of the page, which looks a lot cleaner.
On those same posts, I also redid the table of contents styling and colors to match the new lighter look, and added a recent posts section at the end so it's easier to keep reading once you finish one.
The bottom nav bar also quietly disappears while you scroll here, so it stays out of the way until you need it. Single posts also get a back button now that takes you right back where you came from. So if you were browsing the archive and tapped into a post, back takes you to the archive. If you came from the home page, back takes you to the home page.
The newsletter page finally got some real attention too. I installed the Newsletters plugin earlier this year and eventually got around to fixing up the CSS and styling for the newsletter list and single view.
Today I took it further — I wanted it to feel like you're actually inside an email while browsing past newsletters, almost like scrolling through your own inbox. That's the direction I went with this time.
I'd read a few blog posts about doing a light and dark toggle before, and thought it was a great idea, mostly for eye health — bright, light colors at night can be rough on your eyes, and I didn't want that during nighttime reading.
I found this article about time-based background color transitions, and it gave me an idea.
Since I'd already decided to go lighter with this redesign, I hadn't thought much about nighttime reading until this article made me rethink it. So I decided to implement something similar on the blog: instead of a plain on/off toggle, a sunrise and sunset background transition based on your own location — kind of like the Night Shift feature on Windows and Mac, but built into the site itself.
The background now shifts through the day based on your own clock, right where you're reading. Pre-dawn starts deep navy, then eases into a dusky navy as sunrise gets close. Sunrise brings in a pale, warm cream — morning is intentionally lighter than evening. Daytime settles into the site's regular colors, completely unchanged. As sunset approaches, it shifts into a warmer cream tone, easing back into dusky navy and then deep night navy after dark. It's live now, quietly shifting in the background as the day goes on.
This is what I've been tinkering with to get things closer to how I want them. Take a look around the site and let me know what you think. I'll probably keep making small changes quietly as I go — some areas still need a bit more tinkering.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
— Winston Churchill
Never quite done. Always a little better.