Design of this Blog

01 Jan 2023, 465 Words

I took a questionable amount of time trying to craft the design of this site. In this piece of writing, I try to piece and weave the thoughts that made me do so.

Non-Reactive

I truly enjoy sites where I don’t have to see many moving parts, especially when the site is catered for reading. I don’t like animations, frown upon weird slideshows and I absolutely abhor advertisements. I do not care if that is how people make money - I just hate them so much. Blogger was slow and clunky, WordPress had weird advertisements all over the place and Substack/Medium felt a little too controlled and centralised; a sneaky way for these platforms to adamantly recommend articles and improve click rates.

Nope, not for me.

People’s writings hold a special place in my heart, and I want to comprehend and consume them in a non-distracting way. Naturally, I would want my readers to have the same experience as well. And therefore, this site consists of no Javascript or any reactive code - it is a purely static site, generated by a static site generator. You click a link, you get shown a different page. No fancy single-page-application. No storing of states. None of the non-essentials. Just old-school web over here.

Columns

There are three columns on this page - or at least on the home page. The leftmost column has to succinctly convey what this whole site is about. The tagline might look cryptic, but I think it conveys the intention really well. The rightmost column has to exemplify order of some sort. An endless stream of posts is no good for anyone, entropy has to be addressed. As of now, I decided to go with categories to tackle that. I think that is a good start. Each hyperlink presents a list of posts people might want to zoom in on. In the near future, some other metric could be used. But this is fine for now.

And now, the content. I think posts should always be centered. And they should be of certain width. It is difficult to predict the sizes of screens, and therefore, it would be a safe bet to simply center content and keep the width constant. The eyes do not get strained going left and right. Also, I made it a point to ensure that the reader only sees the content when a post is read - the leftmost and rightmost columns disappear. No distractions, only words.

Colors

White, grey and black. Ah, what a beautiful trio.

Credits

I used Jekyll’s static site generator instead of pure HTML/CSS/Javascript. The concept of a static site generator is amazing, to be honest. Also, the site was not built from scratch but built over another design - Hyde.