Hmmm... the dust is thick... about one year thick. How did that happen?

2017 was not a great year. I'm sure many others would say the same for various purposes and reasons, but mine are my own. I'd argue that it was probably one of my most depressed years on record. Nothing seemed to click, outside of drinking and wallowing in similar misery with friends. There's some hyperbole in there; there were some reasonable moments of 2017, but it had the lowest lows, I think.

But we're not here to talk about depression. That's a post (or more) all its own.

Can you believe it's been six years since I last redesigned this blog? Indeed, for a sequence of time, redesigns were nearly annual. I've no doubt that part of the cool off was simply my entrance into web developent as a profession. I've exactly one redesign since beginning my employ at the end 2009. No doubt running RedditBooru and AnimeBracket on the side has contributed to the slacking as well. Who wants to rewrite a blog when you've got two successful websites that demand attention?

But, six years, man... that's a long time.

This redesign comes at a time where minimalism is at the forefront of design. Gone are the days of small text, gaudy colors, and rounded corners. In is simple to read typography and spatially considerate layouts. Makes it easier to style a website, for sure. But, I also went waaaaaaay back to basics on the site engine itself. Instead of the behemoth do-everything-and-framwork-for-the-rest CMS, this site is static. You (probably) won't find comments. You won't find metrics driven "popular content". There is simply... my content. Arguably, some niceties have yet to be added, such as comic navigation, date sorted archives, and maybe tags (I'm on the fence with those; the data is technically there), but I'm okay with the simplicity that is the site right now.

Now, I've not gone back to the days of hand authoring HTML files. I'm better than that. This iteration of dxprog.com is powered by a static site generator that I wrote, because I've not made one of those. The content is all markdown files and the layout is put together with React components. Initially, it was going to be a bunch of handlebars templates, but the notion of using nothing but a bunch of shareable React components to statically stitch a page together intrigued me. Seems to have worked, because here we are. My intention for the site generator itself was to be both standalone and also extensible via an npm package. This site is built the latter way and has its own home on GitHub as well. But, enough technical shit.

When will the next redesign be? Who knows. Six years from now, I'll be pushing forty.

That's a scary thought...