I believe this will be the last I muck about with the design of the site for the foreseeable future. After being disappointed by the available themes, and further disappointed by my own design ability, I went back to basics. And by basics I mean that I found a few sites that I like the look of and copied large chunks of HTML and CSS to build a custom Jekyll theme.

I spent some time over the past couple nights adopting a new theme for the old digs here at jb. I found the beautiful Chalk theme by Nielsen Ramon and adopted my site to use it, including, finally, a working tags system. I’m quite happy with the tags, but I’m less happy with the bundled deployment system the theme shipped with.

I’ve never been 100% happy with this site. On the one hand, Jekyll lets me have full control of my content, and I never have to worry about losing any of it or having anything locked inside a database on a server somewhere. On the other hand, things like adding media is more complicated than I’d like. I’ve written scripts to help, of course, but I’d really rather have the best of both worlds.

I spent some time remodeling the old digs here, adding a fresh coat of paint in the form of a new theme, new hosting, and a shiny new SSL lock.

This is a bit silly, I’ll be the first to admit. The contraption I’ve built to host this site is clearly unnecessary, especially when I could host the site on Github for free, with very little effort, but I was curious, so down the rabbit hole I went.

Like the good doctor, I knew as soon as I saw Bigfoot that I would be adding it to this site. ¹ I’ve avoided footnotes up till now because the HTML formatting for them seemed far too fiddley, and the Jekyll Markdown processor I was using did not support them.