A New Look
I’ve given this blog a new look by switching the theme from Noteworthy to Long Form, the latter a theme of my own design.
Why the change?
I adopted the Noteworthy theme at the onset of this blog and maintained a branch with some fixes (primarily KaTeX support). Since it is a cliche that engineering blogs will write more about the blog’s infrastructure than actual content, I wanted to first establish a track record of content before spending too much effort on design. Now, with a few years of posts, there were a few factors that pushed me to create something new:
- Printing Support The old site created near unprintable pages. I want my works to be useful offline.
- Dense Tables Many of my articles feature tables, often with dense content - many columns and rows. Noteworthy’s table CSS did not scale to that level of data which hampered my ability to present information. (I expect I’ll continue to tinker with Long Form’s table formatting.)
- Unsupported Noteworthy was no longer supported or updated by the author. As open-source, I could have continued to maintain my branch and make other changes, but a clean slate both allows a new vision and reduces the maintenance burden.
On dropping tags
The previous site had a section for tags, which never worked because I hadn’t tagged any pages. I explored adopting an existing system like ACM’s CCS, but that system is not supportable within Hugo’s functionality. Further, my content often does not align with CCS. There is enough content that adopting some tag or taxonomy makes sense, but I’ll wait until I have a system before advertising its presence again.