renovating

It's been days since an excitingly laptop-shaped parcel arrived at my door and I've already performed the biggest redesign of this website in months. I'll fawn over the new laptop and mourn its predecessor in a future article but suffice to say the ability to work untethered has inspired me to work at all.

So, what are the changes? Avid readers will surely have spotted them all, but I'll reveal them here for those less familiar.

fonts

Gone are my days using the modern font stack, where every platform used a subtly different variant based on what was available. I'll miss the feeling of righteousness (and the performance and native feel I guess) but I'm self-hosting so at least I can keep my nerd-cred.

The body is now Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, created by the Braille Institute. I like it so much I've even updated my phone to use it. It's designed to be hyperlegible (who would've guessed) and I think they've knocked it out of the park. My only quibble is it's a touch small, so I've bumped the font size to 1.1rem. I believe that's the accessible way to do it but there's so much advice out there I've lost track.

The headings are serifed with Libre Baskerville by Pablo Impallari. I have no reason for choosing this, other than I was scrolling through fonts and took a liking to it. Looks nice though, huh?

where did all the links go?

At the bottom of every page resided a navigation^[0] of links. These pointed those who wanted more of me to my code forge, email, Mastodon, RSS feed and the CSS Joy webring. While practical, it never fit the flow of the site which, if we ignore the large navigations of links that are the making and thinking pages, tries to fit links into the flow of the prose.^[1]

That navigation is now gone. In its place is nothing … a lot of nothing, but we'll come back to that. I've created a new felix waller is a website section on the home page that includes the RSS feed, email and webring, slotting neatly into that page's theme. The forgotten links are not missed: I hardly use Mastodon nowadays and my forges are linked from every making page.

a lot of nothing

Scroll to the bottom of the page. What do you see?

Nothing.

We in the biz call that overscroll. It's something included in every code editor (almost every, looking at you with the anger only a university Java module can generate, Eclipse) and I've grown used to how easy it makes reading. There's no need to move your eyes down to the bottom of the screen when you can move the text up to meet them.

This may feel unnatural at first, but you'll come to appreciate the comfort this affords, and if you don't then tough shit this is my website not yours go make your own website you ignorant piece of

Pardon me. I think it's time for a lie-down.