Tag: Design
Huge Refactoring in Gaia Sky: ECS
Moving the old inheritance hierarchy to an entity component system
In these last few days I have merged a huge internal refactoring into Gaia Sky’s master branch. This refactoring has been cooking for several months and has adapted or completely replaced virtually every piece in the code base. Read on if you want to know more.
Search functionality in a small website like mine is usually arguably useless. I, for once, never even care to check whether a specific website offers it. I find a post that interests me via a search engine or aggregator, navigate to the page, read the post and then leave. However, I am not against local, serverless indexing and searching, even though most search engines provide site-specific searches. That is why I moved the search function of this website to a local, JavaScript-based implementation. How to do it? Read on.
Website Dark Theme
How to implement a dark theme for your website, plus a small discussion on the recent redesign that aims at simplifying the experience
If you are like me and you like your user interfaces to be as dark as possible, you have the dark mode preference of your browser enabled. You may have noted that this site has now a dark mode which is activated by default. This is done by querying the prefers-color-scheme setting in the browser. This post describes how this is done, and it discusses a few tweaks I have implemented design-wise to simplify things and remove useless visual elements.
New Simpler Design
New less bloated website design
I’ve once again changed the design of the site to make it cleaner, more simple and above all, less bloated. I’ve removed a bunch of javascript code (for instance, MathJax is no longer loaded by the main template but by the actual pages that really need it). Also, I’ve simplified the color palette settling on a black on white scheme with green for links and titles.
Old (left) and new (right) design side-by-side. The new design is cleaner and more pleasant to the eye.
The new design also looks better on mobile screens, as I took some care of adapting the templates for pocket devices. Finally, I changed the home page from the blog summary listing to an introduction and welcome page, and added a full blog listing page containing a list of all blog post titles sorted by date.
New Web Design
We have updated the design of the site
As you may have noted, I updated the look and feel of the website to a more sober, greenish and polished design. The moon in the header has been replaced by a jumping monkey, which is always likeable. Regarding performance, this new site has less and smaller CSS files and less images and therefore it loads faster. Additionally, it uses HTML5, which is good. I also took the opportunity to update to the latest version of drupal and make use of the newer ZEN base theme.