I've done a complete restyle of the web site.
I'm a massive fan of emacs for a very long time, specifically org-mode (for nearly as long). More and more, I use these tools for my writing, whatever the context, and many years ago I went looking for a mechanism to blog through emacs and orgmode.
I eventually found o-blog, which I have been using ever since.
However, I never liked the default styling that came with it, and I
have always wanted to change it. The problem was that its all based
on Bootstrap and less, and seemed to contain a lot of javascript,
technologies I just did not have time to learn in order to use a
different style.
Of course, I didn't help myself by not incorporating o-blog as a git project and taking and using updates as they came along.
Anyway, I ripped out Bootstrap and less, broke my web site, and started building it back up again with just a plain CSS file.
The result is what you see in front of you1.
This has allowed me to do a few things behind the scenes:
- Remove all dependencies on o-blog's versions of the templates and styling files.
- Separate out code for my site and code for the o-blog engine. More on that below.
- Remove all use of javascript except for that one bit I wanted/needed to control the top menu above.
For me, this will make it easier to manage the web site, as I now know the distinction between what's part of my site and what's part of the o-blog engine.
My site is based on version 1.2 of o-blog, but o-blog itself is no longer supported by the developer. Sébastien Gross worked to upgrade and modernise o-blog (developing up to release 2.6), but it would have broken my web site for me to use it, and then a few years ago, he stopped updating it. My work above has put me in a position to manage the code somewhat myself.
So, this will be my next little project – to modernise o-blog to support blogging with the newer versions of GNU Emacs and org-mode. I'm not releasing anything quite yet, but will look at doing so in the coming months.
