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+++ title = "New Design 2020" date = 2020-01-27T15:42:29+11:00
[extra]
updated = 2019-07-01T22:40:53+10:00
+++
It's been more than 10 years since I started working on the previous design for this website 😅, although it won't have been public for 10 years until July 2020. This feels like a good point to come up with a one!
The previous design served me well. The uncluttered design focussed on text was fast and responsive. It saw the introduction of new devices like iPad and a gradual increase in mobile display size without needing updating. The new design aims to retain these features while giving it a lighter feel. I'm using the Manrope variable font for all text.
Technology wise, the previous site was built with Nanoc, a Ruby static site compiler. I've been very happy with Nanoc. As my programming interests have shifted away from Ruby to Rust in the last decade I wanted to try a Rust static site compiler. The site is now built with Zola. Zola is perhaps not quite as flexible as Nanoc but I've been able to achieve everything I wanted to with it. It's super fast and has nice conveniences like live-reload when editing content. Being a single file native binary also makes installation straightforward — no need to juggle Ruby versions or install gems.
Inspired by Chris Krycho and Shaun Inman I've taken to versioning the
website instead of attempting to port all the existing content over to the new
technology. This makes the redesign more of a clean slate and leaves old posts
appearing how the did when originally posted. The new site is hosted under the
/v2/ prefix. This allows all existing pages to stay where they are and
retains the www.wezm.net domain.
Finally, I've now open sourced the repository that the site is generated from. This is to allow others to see how the site is built and also to submit corrections/fixes if they're noticed.