I’ve been looking for a new theme for a while becuase I didn’t love the one I had. I used anubis which looked good enough but didn’t quite have the style I wanted. I also didn’t want to rely on themes with Javascript and didn’t want any analytics included even if they could be disabled. I started writing my own because I wasn’t happy with what I could find, but decided against that because I do very little frontend work so it would’ve taken forever.

I eventually remembered Amin’s readable.css and decided to use the Hugo theme loosely associated with the project. Because I post primarily text I like the intent being easy to read with no distractions on the page. I did a litle bit of customization and here we are!

I took the opportunity to make a few other changes. I wrote a new homepage which includes a list of favorite posts in addition to the most recent posts. It’s even updated automatically by adding a field to the frontmatter of a post! On my reading page, I now show the text of the post for only the current year to make the page less overwhelming. Previous years show title and author with a link to the post for the book. I also brought back the “Broken Intuition” title (which was absent for a few years) instead of my name, honestly just because. I don’t have a specific reason. I added the subtitle “A digital garden by Matt Owens” as a sort of starting point for trying to make this more of a site with pages I update rather than strictly a reverse-chronological blog. That’s an idea I’ve been attracted to in the past and I’m excited to give it a try.