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Thursday, June 11, 2020

Over the years I’ve realized I’m a terribly inconsistent writer. I’ve started a half dozen blogs1Socialitis.com, Devgear.com, LeftAtSunrise.com, PaulLegan.com, AudioGizmo.com, and finally Paul.io. Sadly, many of those have devolved into parked domains or otherwise spammy sites. since 2005 and haven’t seemed to write more than 40-50 posts on any one of them despite (1) putting in the work to learn various CMS tools and (2) putting in the thought behind various redesigns. That said, here we are with a fresh design and an optimistic outlook on writing frequency.

First, let’s start with a comparison of this latest design with the previous.

In reality, the design hasn’t drastically changed. What’s different, however, is the CMS (I’ve migrated from Jekyll to Hugo) and a modernization of the CSS that renders each site. I’ve fully embraced CSS variables and minimized a lot of the cruft I usually include in a base template (without sacrificing solid typography).

::root {
    --font-default: clamp(18px, 1.4vw, 22px);
    --font-tiny: 0.8rem;
    --font-s: 0.87rem;
    --font-m: 1.1rem;
    --font-l: 1.4rem;
    --font-xl: 1.7rem;
}

Additionally, I took a little more care in how I approached Hugo shortcodes to showcase common elements in my posts. I’ve included shortcodes for comparison sliders (like the one above), asides, terminal commands, and other widgets that will (hopefully) make their way into my writing here.

Anyway, I hope to share some of my newly-learned Hugo and style tricks in future posts. Thanks for stopping by!