I Sought A Theme And Sought For It In Vain
It doesn’t matter how satisfied I am with any particular redesign of the blog, it seems inevitable that sooner or later I will start to feel literal anxiety sensations when I open it up and will need to change it up all over again.
Most recently, I dumped the design that worked off of Stewart by Automattic and switched (back, actually) to one that works off of Hey by Automattic which I’ve continued to tweak.
During this change, I read Manuel Moreale’s thoughts on website flexibility and it reminded me that at one point I’d considered giving each source here its own background color, something at the time I was pulling from MetaFilter. Mostly it never happened because I didn’t want to have to determine that many background colors.
Moreale’s site, which I recently told him I find elegant and calming, did remind me that I mostly dislike “online-style” paragraphs, with no indentations and white-space between them. I’d not even noticed until this week that Moreale’s blog has normal paragraphs. The continuing work I’ve been doing customizing Hey now incorporates normal paragraphs.
Yesterday I sat down to try to put the entire most-recent post on the front page, something I’ve done on prior blogs, but for some reason while this worked in the block editor it refused to work on the front page.
In the end, I decided that the excerpt that did work actually is a better idea, in part because I do want to keep the front page relatively light and I’d already restored the “on this day”, “recently read blogs”, and “find more blogs” areas down below.
I’m mostly satisfied, once again, with how the blog looks, and I’d like to be satisfied with it for sufficiently long enough to be able to stop tinkering with it and get back to the actual restoration project, which languishes.