Website update – August

Colors are back!

Well, at least two: red and blue for the sidebar (red for light theme; blue for dark). I was getting a little bored with the cream-black spectrum in every element. Still, as you can see, the rest of the site is still monochrome. I also removed the little fleurons as decorations. I am really bad at graphics design, so I just picked a couple of svg fleurons from Wikimedia to give the site a “nice” look, but they looked a bit out of place.

Site is mobile friend…lier

Having to design the layout to be small-device friendly is not as easy as I thought it would be. Every time I try to add something new to the main section of the HTML, I have to readjust the margins and padding for small screens. It’s a royal pain! Sometimes I feel I have to scrap everything and start over again. Hopefully I won’t have to resort to that, as I have already invested a lot into the current design.

What happened to minimalism?

When I came to Neocities, I had one goal in mind: to share content in the simplest way possible, i.e. just text and a little bit of fiddling with margins and fonts, etc. I took inspiration from this (in)famous website (link contains strong language, beware!) and from the Gemini project. But seeing others’ work in the Neocities platform, I realized my content would not get any traction if I stuck to my guns. So I added colors… a lot of them! And that made the site look cartoonish. That’s why I switched to a monochrome style. Then to make navigation easier and not just clutter the main page with a bunch of links, I decided to create a sidebar. This was not easy, let me tell you.

My original idea was that the sidebar would contain nested drop-down links. To achieve this I needed a way to extract titles and dates from the blog posts—except the main index, the about-me page, and any “articles”—and then feed that data to the sidebar…somehow. (Here I should mention that I am building the site without the help of a Static Site Generator. Everything I write is in plain text markdown, which gets converted to HTML with pandoc with the help of a Makefile. Likewise, I don’t use any CSS or JavaScript framework. I type everything manually… or, almost manually… in Vim.) After a few days of hell, I managed to create the nested links. However, it was obvious that the sidebar would eventually contain more text than could be displayed without a scrollbar, which is kind of ugly on a sidebar. Therefore, I had to scrap the whole idea of nested links. What you see now is a simple sidebar with links to sub-indices.

At this point I realized that (despite the pain) I actually liked studying web development. It’s fun and interesting, like solving a logic puzzle. It then hits me: I won’t be able to make any progress in web development if I adhere to strict minimalism. To get better at coding one needs a lot of practice! If I were to follow in the footsteps of this website, my learning journey would’ve stopped a long time ago.

Still, I believe minimalism is not monolithic: it comes in varying degrees. For instance, in terms of living conditions, a “true” minimalist would probably choose to live, like the Greek philosopher Diogenes, in a ceramic jar on the streets or out in the wilderness. That is not a choice that is open to most of us. But another minimalist would live in a normal house in the city, except with the bare minimum of possessions. Yet another one would maybe choose to keep more than the bare essentials, while maintaining a feeling of Zen in the home through careful organization. There is no one definition of minimalism.

So this site is still within the bounds of what I consider a minimalist website. It conforms to the “nutritional pyramid” of a lot of HTML at the base, a little less CSS in the middle, and a touch of JavaScript at the top.

The JavaScript is unavoidable. It’s needed to change the theme for this site from light to dark. There’s a way to achieve the same result with CSS only, which involves detecting the user’s OS preferences, but I know that many people never change the theme of their operating system, and so this website would never change for them. Since protecting my eyes from harmful blue or bright lights at night has been a constant for years now, I’m not keen on depriving my viewers of the choice to protect theirs. Conversely, dark themes during the day put strain on the eyes, especially if one is in a well-lit room. So having a single theme is a no-go.

JavaScript is also needed to display advanced math! At one point I want to write a few articles about what I’ve learned in Set Theory, and the symbols required to display the notation are not really available in plain HTML.

All in all, I’d say the website is heading in the right direction. I just hope I’m able to keep my stuff organized to avoid the dreaded bloat that infects the modern Internet!