Planting A Seedlet
It’s never a good sign for me to start feeling squirrely about my blog design. Partly because it’s a gargantuan task should I decide on a complete overhaul, and partly because this squirreliness often comes when I’m feeling especially disjointed or dejected about life in general.
There’d been some aimless tinkering over the past week, most of which I rolled back in short order. Yesterday I started considering whether or not I wanted to spend some time adapting Seedlet, a theme I’ve used before. It didn’t take long for me to reconsider. I’m fairly sure I’m capable, I just wasn’t motivated to try.
Instead, I’ve opted to make some changes to my existing custom theme which point it in a slightly Seedlet-ward direction. I’m still not actually satisfied with things, but right now it’s basically more a matter of stalling by making some improvements here and there while I wait to see if dissatisfaction with the blog theme is projection and deflection away from weightier things I cannot actually control.
I wasn’t even going to do the usual thing of blogging about design changes, but then I saw Rach Smith’s redesign post and opted to go ahead.
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!
Part of the problem is that I don’t really have any particular intentions, per se, just a vague sense of disquiet and unease when looking at my own blog. This certainly explains why I’ve gone through, well, let’s just leave it at multiple themes over the course of just this year.
Someday there will be a large language model with which I can build a semantic, accessible, and pleasant blog theme that does everything I need it to do, and try out many different variations, but without all the fucking headache and hassle. Maybe I’d stumble into something that makes me go, “Oh, this is it.”
Addenda
- It’s unusual to add something so soon after publishing a post, but my imagined blog theming LLM absolutely would not generate code that looks anything like what’s produced by WordPress’ god-awful Gutenberg setup. I don’t mind Gutenberg in and of itself, but the HTML it produces is borderline unreadable by human eyes, and I think that when you view the source of a blog, it should be easy to understand what the fuck is happening.