Time for a new look

Time for a new look

Ever since I moved to Acrylamid, my blog's look has been quite spartan. While I liked the simplicity and minimalism of the theme, several of my friends, some of which are more ar­tis­ti­cal­ly inclined then I am, told me that is a bit too... stark.

For a long time I've been gathering all kinds of cool ideas and snippets that I liked from various sites and yesterday was finally the day that I hunkered down and actually im­ple­ment­ed the first one. I didn't have a clear idea in my head from the beginning of how it would look, only that I wanted to be able to dis­tin­guish blogs belonging to different categories easily. So, each category has a different assigned color. Don't try to read (see) too much into each color, as they have been chosen to be ap­prox­i­mate­ly equally spaced out on the hue circle for 47% saturation and 80% luminance.

Cătă gave me the idea to also separate posts with the zig-zag paper effect. Then I spent a couple of lovely hours trying to actually make effect. Conclusion: CSS3 is dark magic. In the end I copy-pasted from another guy's blog and made some small changes. And then I finally delved into CSS pre­proces­sors, SCSS, to avoid writing the code for all the categories separately. Lots of magic there as well.

Another thing I did is re­cat­e­go­rize my posts. When I moved to Acrylamid, I switched to using just 3 categories, Me, Pro­gram­ming, Funny, but they were extremely imbalanced (60%, 30%, 10%) and not quite accurate. So for the last month or so I've had fun with this. I tried various machine learning algorithms to try to find a better cat­e­go­riza­tion, but I have too little data so it didn't quite work out. In the end I went over all of them myself and re­or­ga­nized them:  Personal, Reviews, Pro­gram­ming, Events, Opinions, Blogging and Misc. While looking over all my posts I realized that I wrote a loooot during the last (almost) 5 years and I chuckled quite a lot at some of my old posts. Or at the memories they brought back.

Hope you like it and stay tuned for more design changes (sometime. soon.).