Inspired by a few motherfucking websites , I decided to simplify the layout of my blog. While I get the humor and sarcasm of those pages, I generally enjoy and prefer minimalism and my blog is no different. This is mostly driven by pragmatism rather than idealism, so I want to at least mention a few things I didn’t like by the old, default layout.

Text and Topic Centric

First, I thought the general flow of the old layout was too cumbersome. I wanted to focus mainly the topics, so I reduced the home page to a list of the articles and then a page for the articles themselves. I’ve even done away with an about page. The header is a link back to the home page to go back to the list of articles.

I don’t claim to be a great designer, but I tried to make the text clear and easy to read, including code. I removed all the external dependencies for CSS and font and reduced the rules to browser standards that I hope are pleasing to read (or, at least, not terribly unpleasant to read). I also tried to make it look acceptable on mobile and tablet devices as well.

Removed External Dependencies

As mentioned above, I removed all the external dependencies. All the CSS is now just a few lines static at the top of each page, so that reduces the need for another network request. I also dislike relying on third-party CDNs that the old layout used by default.

The old layout had dependencies on bootstrap and jQuery. While I have nothing against either of them, they are far heavier than I want for my personal blog.

I also changed the syntax highlighting to be inline rather than through a stylesheet. Again, reducing the number of network requests and files that I need to maintain.

Another dependencies that I removed was Katex , which is a math typesetting library. At the moment, I don’t plan on doing much math on the blog, so this is unnecessary.

The Future

For the moment, I like this layout and will probably stick with it for a while. I might make some small tweaks here and there, but overall I want a simple layout. That being said, there are a few features that I might make it back into the site at some point.

First, I mentioned above that I don’t plan on doing math on the blog, but I do enjoy math. If it ever gets to the point that I want to share some of that here, I may add that capability back in.

Second, some sort of comment system. I’d enjoy getting some feedback on what I’ve shared if I missed something or could do it a better way or just need calling out if I say something profoundly idiotic. At the moment, I’m not sure that I want to add the overhead of managing comments, so I haven’t really pursued this feature much.

Finally, some other pages. I removed the about page for the time being because I don’t think there is much to put on that. I may bring that back at some point and maybe other other pages for specific topics as well. I’ll just play that one by ear.