I'm proud of this one. Made some new icons, hacked up more of the original theme, and made things just a tiny bit more mobile-friendly.
Icons
Spent some time in Inkscape throwing together some simple icons that I don't completely hate. Just 2 of them for now, the favicon and a question mark, which is used as the favicon for the 404 page. I'm not entirely sure that this visual style will develop further or if I'll switch to something else later, but I kinda like it this way right now. I'm also experimenting with the Open Graph protocol things in the main template so that my site embeds nicely in chat apps.
Theme
The base theme for this site is the Zola after-dark theme. It's definitely a good looking one, but I have made some changes for this update. The biggest improvement is adding some shortcodes for inline image styling to help theme the posts more easily and flexibly. The other changes are mostly down to writing up a little document for myself laying out the theme rules, like going forward I will make all posts have a 6:1 cover image. This keeps things slim for mobile viewers who are scrolling through the feeds. This document also lays out my color scheme, which is primarily black and a specific orange tone that I enjoy.
Another big change to the theme is that media is now restricted by the size of the post wrapper, which means that content which is too large will be scaled down to fit the viewport. This helps fit big (high res) images onto narrow screens, which was a problem with my first post.
I want to explore making my own cursors for this site later on.
Small File Structure Change
A small tweak to the organization of the files for the site, specifically what is defined as a core post. Core posts are now defined as any internal page that needs to be separate from the main feed. They also shouldn't be tagged. This should keep navigation of the tags page from being clogged with internal pages that are accessed by other means.
Wrapping Up
That's all I got to say on this post. The goal with all this initial setup is to find a workflow that works for me and that will be extensible and long-lasting. Getting this site up and running was definitely rushed a bit, but that did force me to learn stuff fast. Now that the big changes are out the way, I should be able to start focusing on posting my art and other media Cohost style. Thanks for reading, you're always appreciated.
here's a little gift in the form of a shortcoded image embed with inline styling, as a test.
