A bit of a redesign
Generally speaking, I don’t think redesigns or rebrands are constructive. Change tends to jazz up interest and rebrands and redesigns are no exceptions, but I’m strongly of the opinion that brands genuinely don’t matter that much – whatever positive associations a brand has comes from consistency – and if companies invested the same time and effort into actually serving their customers, they would see the same effect.
But because we don’t exist in a multiverse, you can’t A/B test a rebranding or a identity redesign.
So, this is not that. I’m not pushing a new design to rebrand or jazz up interest. The primary reason why I redesigned the site was simple:
I hate Hugo.
It is a pain in the ass. It’s fast but keeps breaking to such an extent that just the thought of updating the hugo binary is anxiety-inducing.
The main reason for the redesign is a switch to Eleventy which has been my preferred tool for making websites for a long while now. This change should hopefully make me less hesitant to tweak and polish the site over time.
I’ve been putting this switch off for a while – the basic theme design was mostly done last year – but I kept making excuses for putting it off:
- I haven’t implemented any support for dark mode. Just add it later.
- The design has a bunch of rough spots. Just fix it later. It’s already more polished than the old design.
- I need to go over hundreds of posts in the archive to make sure they render properly. They’ll be fine. Check them out over time.
- I’m afraid I’ll break something.
That last part is a valid concern but, honestly, what can I break that the tech industry hasn’t already broken? Search traffic is gone. Twitter traffic is gone. LinkedIn penalises external links. Bluesky and Mastodon are a bit of a mess, but they mostly direct people to what’s linked, so if the new and popular posts look okay, they’ll be fine.
Sure, you can always make it worse, but tech has already taken the “things that are likely to go wrong in a site redesign” and one by one just outright made those failure modes the default.
Pushing a new design and new static site generator is also an effective method for distracting myself from all the other anxiety-inducing crap that’s happening with a bit of anxiety that’s marginally less harmful.
In the process of switching the site to Eleventy I added a few more feeds and added two new categories of posts:
The notes category exists primarily to prevent off-topic posts from pushing on-topic essays down the list and make it easier for people who are primarily following the site for my coverage of tech, web, and software development to find those essays. Hopefully this will also alleviate some of my anxiety about publishing off-topic notes on my site.
The coding category is an experiment. I haven’t had a place to jot down short coding notes online. I don’t know if this will be useful to me or others, but I’m going to try.
I also imported all the essays from the newsletter archive. I haven’t changed their canonical location but this way you can find everything of note that I’ve written all in one place.
I did remove the ConvertKit newsletter script. The form is supposed to work just as well without it and I figure less JS is a good thing. If newsletter signups drop off completely, then I won’t have to guess why, but hopefully that won’t happen.
There’s a good chance I’ve broken something in this transition.
Files that I forgot to copy over, URLs that have broken, or something that’s just outright broken. If you find an issue, let me know.