It's been just over 2 years since the last website revamp. It would've been just under if I had finished these changes faster.

No wonder V5 still felt so new and fresh--because it was. I'm still happy with the design of it overall, but I once again simply didn't want to maintain it.

• Adding new content was a pain with the separate "content" subdomain and also because the site was held together with the bare minimum to make it work.
• The top tab bar was never built to wrap properly, so I couldn't have more than 2 things there ("Home" and "Blog") without needing to rewrite it.
• The "about" section on the home page made me cringe soon after publishing it, talking about myself just feels weird.
• The titles for the projects on the homepage were rarely centered right, and the ascii art increased load times and why the fuck did I not just make it a picture.
• Svelte did some changes in their version 5 that I couldn't fully wrap my head around and rewrite the existing state in, meaning for whatever reason the theme selector didn't work on individual blog pages.
• For whatever reason, updating Yarn packages takes 10 minutes just to figure out what the new versions are.
• I got constant Dependabot notifications from GitHub talking about [critical issue with feature I probably don't use] and only making a pull request to fix it half the time.

Maybe I got older.

Maybe I got busier.

Maybe I got impatient with the whole web ecosystem.

Maybe the whole web ecosystem moved on when I wasn't looking.

Either way, the theme of Website V6 is "Keep it simple, stupid." Assuming it's still the current version whenever you're reading this, you can probably already tell.

• The overall style is much simpler with less moving parts. It's the bare minimum needed to convey the content.
• No more theme switcher. No more typed.js. Less code for me to maintain.
• It's mostly Markdown files converted to HTML with Zola, a static site generator. Less hoops to jump through to update it.
• Pictures only where it's useful or needed. Less stuff to load so the pages are faster.

I was somewhat inspired by brutalist website design to cut out most of the unnecessary stuff, letting me sideline my perfectionism which demanded a responsive, ultra-modern design. The goal isn't to remove everything, but rather to put focus on the content, make the website more honest, and make it easier for me to maintain.

As such, I didn't strip out all the styles, making sure my site is less brutal on the eyes than fucking Times New Roman on a plain white background. To keep some personality around, I let the homepage splash live and cleaned up the text to feel more true to myself. I'm not trying to sell myself anymore, I'm just trying to live.

As a treat, there's already a new section for lists of things. It's just one list right now, but maybe I'll actually add more this time. We'll see.