Design

Felt like it was time to freshen up the blog again, even though I haven’t been writing as actively anymore. Just new colors, the layout/functionality has remained basically the same—though I did fix a small bug that occurred when a post didn’t have any tags. Also went back to specifying the font used instead of user preference, since this font just felt right.

It feels like I at some point need to rethink the branding on here, “Rambling Priest” just doesn’t really feel right anymore, not representative of who I am or the content. Probably should go with something that isn’t such a reference to World of Warcraft anymore since the content isn’t necessarily focused around the game anymore and more just about me and who I am. Not sure where to go with that as of yet though, so I suppose I’ll let it lie for now.

As feels like is becoming a yearly tradition at this point, I changed the design of the blog again. I’m currently resisting rather well also changing the software running it as well, since even though that seems like it would be an interesting project it feels like the alternatives would all land me in a worse place than I am in at the moment—to be fair, that hasn’t stopped me before, but still.

Contrary to my considerations at the end of the year, I decided against also changing the name, since I’m really not sure what the new name would be, and silly and out of place it might be at the moment, I think it serves its purpose well—for now, at least. This might all change once more in the future as I learn to know myself better and what I want and expect from this here experiment in doing just that changes with time, but some stability in these turbulent times might be rather welcome.

As for the design itself, it’s gone back to being a bit more understated, clean and modern I guess one could call it, though with some light inspiration from synthwave I guess one could say, though that’s mostly just the background gradient talking. It feels a bit strange going back to something so understated after having the previous design which was something of a nostalgia trip, but I think the problem with that design was that it wasn’t actually all that good in many ways. The post pages themselves were a strange mix of a more modern style with old trappings, the contrast between the text and the background was somewhat poor making reading harder than necessary, and while the name remains inspired by World of Warcraft and my journies there to a great extent—that’s the only capacity in which I am anything resembling a priest—the heavy callout to that in the design didn’t really reflect the current reality of the content all that well. How much those two things need to be related is debatable I suppose, but I still felt there was a certain level of disconnect there.

Another thing the old design didn’t really leave room for implementing properly was “hero images” for the posts, something that I’ve considered doing on and off for a longer time but just didn’t really have a place in the design. The necessity of such images might be debatable, and it is completely validly arguable that the content should speak for itself and not be carried by the work of others in the form of images, but I think the addition of an image to a certain degree set the tone of the post might be a valuable tool. To many of the more recent posts I have already been selecting these images, they have merely had no place to be shown, but for most of the backlog they will be missing and even for future posts I might choose not to make use of them, but still they are now there for your enjoyment; well, assuming you go to the page for a single post at least, felt a bit too much like breaking the flow to display them on the index pages, and I also still have the habit of trying to optimize for connection speeds that are unlikely to be seen these days, so I didn’t want to include a bunch of not-strictly-necessary images on those pages.

The final thing to note then, and a change from earlier times of carefully curating a list of standard fonts applicable to the major operating systems or making use of web fonts, is that the new design intentionally merely states that a sans-serif font is preferred, and the users preference should be respected. Now, I’m sure most users aren’t even aware that they do in fact have the option of specifying such a preference in their browser, much as they might not be aware that they may specify a preference for language and the like, so it might end up meaning that most users will end up seeing some of the rather less pleasing default fonts rather than something nice looking when reading here, but I still felt like respecting that choice was more important for this design than trying to force something else on people even if they are unaware that they are making that choice. To be fair, the default font selection has probably also become quite a lot better since the olden times, so even the defaults might not be that bad, though I wouldn’t know since I’ve intentionally chosen Fira Sans for myself. I suppose that means if you want to see the pages as the author sees them, that would also be an appropriate choice for you, but if not then choose whatever you feel makes for the best reading experience.

It doesn’t feel like that long ago since I last completely changed the design of this blog, yet recently I have for some reason started thinking about changing it up a bit again, strangely enough because the current design feels a bit dated even though that is exactly the point.

I don’t as of yet have any concrete ideas of where to go with a potential new design, so it’s all mostly just thoughts in my head that I decided to put down for my own amusement, but here we are.

I still in a sense want to keep the current general feel of the blog, though perhaps with a few more modern touches like enabling me to if I so choose to pick some of those nice featured images for a post, and perhaps in general being a bit more friendly towards media in my posts. At the same time, using more images and media is something I’ve wanted to do before as well, yet it is something that almost always just ends up being something I want to do instead of something I go through with since I find it somewhat hard to find fitting places for images and don’t necessarily partiularily enjoy the process of finding the fitting imagery for a specific post or point.

This all isn’t really helped along by the theme of the blog currently being very heavily World of Warcraft inspired, yet a lot of the content not necessarily having that much to do with the theme so it feels like there is a certain conflict between the presentation and the content itself which would only be made stronger were I to use things like featured images which exist to give a bit more, shall we say, punch to an article yet might look completely out of place with the theme. I suppose this is why the trend is towards quite a bit more “generic” looking sites with simple and sleek designs, and while those can look really nice I do still enjoy the somewhat oldschool feel that the current theme has.

Another problem becomes that were I to choose to also go that route, it would in a sense become that much more difficult to make the site memorable to potential visitors since it feels like it would then look just like every other blog currently in existence making it all that much more forgettable. Sure, one can argue that just means that the content is more important in those cases, but presentation matters just as much as content.

In the end though, all of these problems and pros and cons are somewhat irrelevant though, since this all is about me expressing myself and not truly writing for any specific audience and consequently the only presentation that matters is the one I myself am comfortable with and the impression it leaves on anyone else is secondary—especially since, let’s be honest, nobody is reading all of this.

All of that is a really long way of saying, I’m thinking about changing things up a bit, and somewhat excited by the idea, but it will probably all end up going nowhere (at least on any reasonable timescale).