Out with the Old, in with the ... Slightly Less Old?

If you ever looked at my website and thought “it’s OK, but it would be even better if it looked like an 18th-century treatise on web design,” you’re in luck!

Yes, friends, I have once again switched things up here. The new design has been optimized for light mode on desktop, but it also works in dark mode and on smaller devices. If you’ve visited the site previously and are still seeing bits and bobs from my old design, purge your browser’s cache and refresh.¹ Or, y’know, don’t. I don’t blame you if you’d like to continue seeing that ridiculous hedgehog in my footer. Be sure to start on the title page for the full experience!

Before you balk, I swear I didn’t use the slop machine to generate that image. I know it looks a little odd (those fingers gripping that bowl, yikes…), but it’s in the public domain and originally appeared in A Rehearsall both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile (1579). It’s a woodcut featuring a normal ass woman giving treats to her cute pets an evil “hainous” witch feeding blood to her wretched familiars. I used Inkscape’s trace bitmap feature to convert the image to SVG, and it struggled a little with the line work.

Anyway, while working on the redesign, it occurred to me that I wanted site navigation to feel a little like thumbing through a book … so I’ve added “previous” and “next” links to the bottom of each page² Thank goodness for SSGs and HTML includes. that’ll take you to the next “chapter” listed in the table of contents. If you ever get lost, you can hover over “previous” or “next” to learn where the link will take you. Try it out! Enjoy the fruits of my painstaking labour!

Last but not least, I’ve added a new section to my colophon that’s devoted to showcasing my previous designs. To be certain, I don’t plan on making major changes like this all that often, but it’s nice to have a record in any case.

Overall, I had a lot of fun putting this new design together. The CSS box shadow tricks help a bit with creating the illusion that you’re reading a book, but the real stars of the show here are the open source fonts I’m using: IM Fell Double Pica and IM Fell Double Pica SC. They complete the illusion, as they look an awful lot like the Double Pica Roman typefaces seen in this image.

Hope you enjoy the new look!

Footnotes