A redesign

A while ago (maybe six months?) I had an idea for a redesign of this website. Since then, I’ve been pottering away on it and finally sent it live last week. I didn’t think it was “ready” yet, but in my mind, it would probably never be ready, and I was starting to get sick of working on it. If you’ve reached a point where you’re starting not to like the design you initially thought was a great idea, it is time to ship the thing before you abandon it altogether!

There were two main things I wanted to do with this version of the site.

1. I wanted to incorporate rainbow lorikeets somehow. I have a real soft spot for these native Australian birds as they are beautiful and would hang out in the trees outside my childhood bedroom window.
2. I wanted to put all the notes on the home page. On the previous version of this site, I had about five recent notes listed with an “All Notes” link. Analytics suggest people would rarely hit the All Notes link and instead stick to the notes on the home page.

Some other things I’ve changed:

• I replaced Talkyard with my own comments solution. I’ll share details on this soon.
• Tags aren’t featured prominently on the home page or other pages. Previously, my tags were like a limited set of “categories” for the notes. I want to be more liberal with my tag names, and I felt like I had to keep the list small when I knew I was placing them all on every page of the site.
• A few site options: dark mode, cursor trails (on desktop) and rainbow links. The rainbow links on my site are a polarising feature. People either love them or hate them. So you now have the option to tone them down 😊.

There are still plenty of things to fix. If you notice something weird, let me know. I appreciate your feedback!