Finally! After three months of planning and wrestling with CSS, I’m ready to announce to the world that I have a new website to show off. Sort of. The design is complete but some content still needs updating and some CSS might be a bit broken. But rather than sit on it waiting for that “right moment”, which almost never comes, I’ve decided to just go with what I have and update incrementally. “Release early, release often”, as they say in software circles.
It’s somewhat interesting that the designs I’ve gone through ever since I started my own personal website in 2006, coincidentally also the time I started using Linux, catalogs my own progression and shifts of interest.
2006 – andreas08
This was when I was introduced into the world of open source and Linux. As such, I was rather new to the whole scene and didn’t really have much time to dig around with CMS and writing my own HTML/CSS designs. So I used a stock WordPress (yes, I used WordPress around that time) theme from Andreas Viklund named andreas08. Sadly it seems the theme is now offline. I chose it because it was simple and blue, ‘nuff said.
2010 – Four Colors
I think it was around this time or a little before it that I switched to Fedora as my Linux distribution. I started out with Kubuntu, had a small adventure with Source Mage GNU/Linux (where, for once in my life, got to get called a mage!), before finally landing on Fedora, where I have been ever since. I’m not really sure what possessed me to base my theme on the same four colors used by the distribution back then. By that time, I was also already on my way towards a minimalist path, switching from the photorealistic icons in the previous themes to plain, single-color ones.
2013 – Minimalist
Minimalism really took off two years ago. In contrast to Four Colors, this is completely grayscale. Around this period, I was obsessed with command line interfaces and terminals. To some extent, I still am, but not in a conventional, completely non-GUI way.. In any case, I decided to practically ditch all imagery except for my personal logo. It looked clean but, to be honest, also boring. Perhaps that’s the reason why I barely touched it, both in design and in content, since then. I’m sticking to that excuse story.
Today and tomorrow
It turns out, I actually like colors. And images. But I also like simple. Good thing, then, that Google came out with the idea of Material Design. It almost seemed like an answer to my prayers. And so I set about imagining how my website will look like with Material Design. And so here it is. Sort of.
OK, it’s not completely and faithfully Material Design. It’s my own distorted interpretation of it. The stubbornness in me required that I write everything by hand. No easy CSS frameworks. Maybe that will change, maybe not. For now, I’m quite satisfied with how it turned out. Who knows for how long though.
The journey isn’t over, of course. My CSS is terrible! It might be breaking in some places so I will really need to do some cleanup. Hopefully it won’t break other parts in the process. I might also switch away from Textpattern as my CMS as it is quickly becoming prehistoric despite its good points.
But most importantly, I will need more content, so the site won’t look as lonely as before. Hopefully this is a start. Hopefully …