I’ve made a few changes to this site.
Design updates
Fewer roundrects, more sharp corners. Fewer random colors, more consistency. An ever-so-slightly more peaceful design.
Screenshots
I spent some time playing with fonts but couldn’t find something I liked better than Lato.
I have of course noticed that serif fonts are really back on the web now, and spent some time trying them out. For this website, I hate them. Some fuse in my head got blown back in 2005 equating sans serif fonts with modern, digital-first text; no matter how hard I try, I can’t look at Source Serif without tasting a high school paper set in Times New Roman a little bit. This isn’t always true when I am browsing someone else’s website focusing on the content, but whenever I am paying attention to typography, it’s there.
Projects, blog, and TIL layouts
I did a facelift of the projects page, including images for more projects and a nicer display on wide screens. I also added a metadata box to all individual project pages (e.g. KeymapKit) to consistently display links to code and documentation, current status, etc.
Updates for the blog and til pages to make links look more consistent across the site.
Screenshots
New project pages and updates
- MindFort, an iOS app for password memorization. Unfinished.
- LightPulse, a prototype for running Hugo inside an iOS app for on-device previews. Very rough proof of concept, not directly useful in its current form.
- chineseroom, a belated page for the LLM agent sandbox VM I use (which I discussed in a previous post but didn’t create a project page for at the time).
- micahandadoria.com, the site I built for my wedding. Currently live at https://micahandadoria.com, future status TBD.
- Lightmarks already existed, but I used to link out to an imgur gallery of screenshots and videos. No longer: those are now hosted on this site and displayed inline.
Going forward, I’d like to have a more intentional visual history of GUI projects, so I can see how they evolved. Right now a few projects have screenshots; it would be great to arrange those in some kind of timeline so I can see how a project’s UI changed over time. I notice that it’s fun to find random screenshots of this website on my hard drive and see what it used to look like. The new on-site Lightmarks gallery and this very post are steps in that direction, but don’t accomplish the whole vision.
Image and video galleries
I added quick and easy galleries that support both images and videos. See examples on the Lightmarks project page and the redacted coloring book gallery.
I built the original version of this for the wedding project page, adapted it for this site, and added video support (so far only used for screencasts).
It use Hugo’s thumbnail generation when possible, but also supports generating thumbnails in advance, which is necessary when working with video files or image types that Hugo doesn’t support yet, like AVIF.
Screenshot
Removed most of twarchive
The twarchive project is dead or at least in a coma, and I realized that the pages take a long time to render. I’ve ripped out the theme entirely, but all the existing archives still work. This means I can’t add new tweets, but I haven’t been able to add new tweets for a while now, ever since the Twitter API v1 got deprecated.
Twarchive produced downloadable and completely standalone files for each tweet, so this was easy: I built the site the old way, copied the generated tweet archive files into the static directory, and removed the theme and the content files that created them.
Nothing has changed about my full archive at https://tweets.micahrl.com, which still uses the twarchive theme.
Dev toolbar easteregg
I decided I hated seeing my developer toolbar all the time while working on the site, so I hid it behind a keyboard shortcut. And, well, now there’s no reason to prevent it from going to production, so you can press opt-d to see it on any page if you want to for some reason. There have been a few changes to it since that last blog post on the topic, too.
