Life circumstances and stress have kept me from paying much mind to my site, but for the past few weeks, I have been chipping away at a completely new and custom look. It’s not perfect but it’s mine. Let’s go over what’s new.

New domain

The changes start with the first thing people see when clicking on links or typing the address into their browsers - the domain. To move away from big US corps, and the US influence in general, vildravn.eu is now the primary domain. Let me explain my thinking here.

Over the years, I’ve owned and used vildravn.net and vildravn.dev. They’re nice, international sounding domains, but they come with some drawbacks, namely that they’re managed by US companies.

.net is managed by Verisign who has managed to stay away from any major controversies for over a decade as far as I can tell, however, it is still an US company, and in 2012 the US government has declared that it has right to seize any .com, .net, .tv, .cc and .name domain by serving a court order to Verisign. I do not think it’s very likely my domain will be seized, but the current US administration’s hostility towards the place where I live makes me feel a bit uneasy.

And then there’s .dev. A very nice, developer oriented top level domain that is operated by a company that needs no introduction - Google. And the less I have to do with Google, the better. If you know a bit about me, I am sure you understand completely.

So while I am probably holding onto both vildravn.dev and vildravn.net for a while, vildravn.eu is now the main domain and the others will redirect here. It’s also nice to show a bit of pride in an institution that’s by no means perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than the US of A.

New design

Now for the change that is immediately obvious when you actually visit the site - I have made my own Hugo theme. It’s by no means perfect, it’s probably pretty janky on mobile but I am quite happy with it. It’s my first time making a Hugo theme from scratch, and it’s the first time in a long while that I’ve done more CSS than just small tweaks.

I’ve had help though. I love TUIs and their look and was wondering if there’s something that would help me achieve a similar look on the web. Turns out there is, and it’s called WebTUI! Genuinely a fun piece of kit that made it pretty easy and fun to put this design together. Colors wise, I took a liking to Rosé Pine so that’s what I’m using here as well now.

I will keep tweaking things here and there, but over-all I am quite happy with it. Got some feedback? Don’t be afraid to say hello.

Smaller changes

Slash pages

Inspired by the resurgence of IndieWeb, I decided to add slash pages. Some more might appear in the future.

Projects

My list of projects got a little upgrade too. Now each project has its own page with a small writeup, and where applicable, some nice pictures to look at.

Discontinued the Bluesky stats

I decided that I don’t want to couple my site to Bluesky so tightly, and I also don’t want Javascript unless it’s absolutely necessary, so as fun as the Bluesky stats were, they have not been migrated over to this new site.

Homepage widgets

A relatively small change but one I am very happy with are the widgets on the Home page. I show off some fun stats, my friends’ website buttons and as with everything else, I might add more stuff there later. I made it dynamic enough so I can just tweak my hugo config to add more widgets or even columns.

It’s been really fun working on the redesign, even if it took longer than wanted. I will probably open-source the theme eventually, when I clean things up.

Hopefully, the next post won’t take me over half a year to write, but no promises there as some pretty major life changes are happening as well.