Redesign

2026-01-24T07:01:29

My web site now has a new appearance. If you had ever visited it, and you are a human being and not a machine, you probably felt a bit lost — and if not, below is how the home page used to look like. There was a reason for this: it was conceived, from its humble beginnings back in the prehistorical days of 2012⁰, to be a place where I could publish technical content, specifically topics related to computer programming, my area of professional expertise.

metamorphosis

For a long time, this intentionally austere and cryptic style was perfectly appropriate, as those who were interested in and who could understand the esoteric and highly specific topics I wrote about were likely the same set of people. But over time the scope expanded, in concert with my interests: as I became established professionally, my focus could be directed (or dispersed) to other areas of life. And because of my rule to always host my own content, instead of leaving it at the mercy of inferior and restrictive platforms, more and more varied sections started to appear:

• the first, and most significant, was the music section, added in 2017
• a page dedicated to literature in 2020
• a traveling journal in 2024
• those dedicated to photography and writing, added just last month

At the same time, my taste and style evolved¹, and the old look represented a progressively smaller aspect of myself and the content of these pages. In addition, with each new section the potential audience grew, both in size and in variety — which is not to say this was intentional or planned, the last thought on my mind when starting a new project is how many people will be interested in it². But it did mean more and more… normal people got to my page and experienced the aforementioned confusion.

rewrite

All of this led me to perform the largest redesign and reformulation this web site has ever seen. I found myself with plenty of free time around the Christmas holidays (though, with all my interests, my time is never really free, just distributed differently), and a strong need to shut off the outside world and dedicate myself to laboring over something meaningful.

What you see now is the product of about two months of work, though more than half of that effort was spent on the actual content of the pages and on improving the code used to generate them³. As a result, and I hope you will agree, they all look more unified, human, and I dare say beautiful. In particular, the home page should now be much more understandable to everyone⁴, while also giving a better idea of the multitude of different pages found in here — and of the reason why I live the life of a hermit.

Lastly, as a sort of celebration (and because why not do it), this page is now also available via a shorter name:

notes

0. The first version of this blog was created and hosted on Google's Blogspot/Blogger service. In 2015, I created the version you see in the picture, from then on all written by myself and hosted on my own server, and in 2019 moved all content here. Since it is a static web site stored in git, you can go look at its entire history, and I can summon from the grave the very first version for your viewing (dis)pleasure (the link to Google+ attests to how ancient it is, read this if you are a spring chicken and have never heard of it):

   

1. The music page is the perfect example of the evolution of this web site's style over the years:

   

2. With the current state of humanity and the internet, that factor to me has the inverse effect, if anything.

3. Which I wrote myself, see this page if you are interested in the details.

4. For the machines among you: do not worry, the old home page still exists, virtually unchanged, but is now properly nested as a subsection of the general content.