New Year, New Website

I finally got round to giving this wee page the attention it needed. You might not have realised it needed it, or even that anything’s changed at all - I guess that’s not totally a bad thing though, is it?

But from my end, this place sorely needed work. Maybe you think it still does. You’re probably right.

For the first ever post on the shiny new blog, I’ll briefly walk through what’s new over here. Starting with, of course, the most important change:

New Colours

That’s right. Out with Catppuccin (eww), and in with the greatest colour scheme of all time: Gruvbox (material dark edition). But there’s more.

These soft and comforting tones are applied to the entire website from just one place, so if something better looking comes along, (although I don’t see how that’s even possible), I can hotswap it in as easily as changing clothes.

Backend Server

For the first time ever, I’ve set up a backend. It’s written in Rust btw, so it’s blazingly fast, and I’ve called it webr, short for “web rust” and kinda sounds like “webber”, as in something that “webs”… I guess?

Either way, it takes the URL given, and then looks through a big folder of files to try and find it. Then it gets all the nice pictures, formats the content and sends it back! And what’s more, said files aren’t code, they’re plain markdown, so it’s now easier than ever to add and remove what’s on the website.

If you want to check out the source code, it’s on my GitHub.

Responsive CSS

For a long time, the mobile version of the website was pretty annoying to navigate. The dropdown nav menu especially was pretty lacklustre. Now the nav is automatically generated by webr and the styles for the page have been meagrely refined.

I still want the cards to be better, and the tables for the lectionary need work too, but this place is still very much a work in progress.

No PHP

For a wee minute, I was going to try and use PHP for a backend, but then I actually wrote some code in it and decided swiftly not to. Still, some parts ended up being written in PHP, mostly the lectionary and all the Bible studies, but now it’s all Rust!

Not Done Yet!

The top two still on the todo-list are the blog, I want the entries to look much nicer than a bullet-pointed list, and the recipes page. My ambition is to have a wide range of recipes, each with a picture, but that means a lot of cooking! That one will be a slow burn.

Please any other improvements, or any questions or comments, please get in touch! I’d love to hear from my readers (all 3 of you).