Blog Facelift Underway

In the next few weeks (months? years?) I’m going to overhaul this blog.

First, I’m going to change the Hugo¹ theme from Ananke to XMin, and then customize the hell out of it. You can see an evolving preview of this project at http://dev.frank-mitchell.com. (As of Dec 21, 2019, it really doesn’t look like much.) The “dev” version’s content may lag behind the main site’s a bit, since I’ll only update “dev” for style changes but the main site will update when I add new blog posts … or any other content.

My other plan is to introduce new sections at the top for role-playing game rules and commentary, personal software projects, fiction, and other things that one would search by topic, not date. (The new XMin theme I hope will make those changes easier, but the current theme allows me to add other top-level links to the home page.) Some will be ported from a previous incarnation of this site, others will be previously unpublished. The original vision for this site was a repository for RPG ideas, software, and fiction, but issues with hugo and other distractions kept me from merging in the old site’s contents. (They’re still available here, in all their 1990’s minimally styled ugliness.

The current blog posts will stay the same, save for minor formatting tweaks. I’ll keep the blog around for current-ish thoughts and half-baked ideas; fully baked ideas will live in these new sections. I might also add a “changelog” section that tracks new and changed pages in these sections, rather than insert them into the regular blog. Or I might not, depending on the effort involved.

It’s also remotely possible I could enable some sort of comment section. Most Hugo templates support Discus. The main reasons why I haven’t so far, and probably won’t:

1. I’d have to keep a Discus account. Do they charge for maintaining that account? For comments in excess of some number per unit time?

2. The docs mention other options, but what do those entail?

3. If I did have a comment section, would anyone comment? Besides spammers, I mean?

4. Conversely, if I did have a critical mass of commenters, I’d then have to curate the comments. How much of my time and (low) energy would that take?

Direct feedback sounds nice … if you’ve never seen YouTube.

Comments on XMin

If the new theme doesn’t look all that great, don’t worry, it will change. That said, some features out of the box are an improvement:

• The main page features a compact list of blog titles from earliest to latest, rather than previewing the top N blogs.
• Content pages have white backgrounds and wider text columns.
• Tables actually have lines and shaded alternate rows.

Features I’d like to reproduce from Ananke:

• A splash image on the Home page, although maybe not the off-brand Doctor Strange-esque astral space view I have now. (I have no idea who created it, and that bothers me.)
• A list of tags (with hyperlinks) at the bottom of each blog page.
• Consistent background, foreground, and higlighting colors of code blocks; those with keyword highlighting have a black background, while those with no highlighting have black text on a white background.
• A list of “related” blogs, but as a list following the main text, not as a sidebar that takes up a third of the page width.