I spent some of my free time today working on my Hugo templates and CSS and cleaning up the basic HTML structure of the site.
Confession time, the files for this site are one hot mess. I am not particularly CSS-savvy, I usually just add stuff until it looks about right, which means I have massive, sprawling stylesheets that have a lot of extraneous lines that don’t actually do anything obvious. The problem then, is when you’re applying a custom sheet on top of that you find yourself having to override lines that never needed to be there in the first place.
My design philosophy hasn’t changed in that I think each thing/item deserves its own page, and I don’t like to duplicate content (duplicate links back to source, not the content itself), so having a microblog listing that regurgitates the contents of the first 5 posts bugs me.
I’m also interrogating basic design choices I kept that were baked into the original theme. If site organization is tag driven, do you need a nav bar at the top of every page? If you’re reading this microblog (bless) and you decide to go to the technical blog or directory, you know how to do this, E.T. Go Home.
Take the footer. You’re aware you are in the depths of the Neonauticon, stored in the sacred hallows of NeoCities, yes? Why then must I remind you with a string of buttons on every single page? It’s one more element that I have to deal with if I apply custom styles to the page.
Anyway, we now have templates for RELATIVELY clean microblog single and list pages and I tossed a ton of cruft CSS noone needed.