Blog updates

The first post

May 26, 2023 3 mins

Tags: web design yonic corner

This post was ported from the modern version. The information on this post refers only to the modern version of this post.

What has changed?

Nothing much, really. The core structure is very similar to the old blog, but it has departed from the generic PaperMod design.

This new design I like to call Vectarcade, is heavily inspired on how the web used to look like in the late 90s to early 2000s, an era where CSS started to gain foothold and pixel graphics were the main trend.

Although for this design, I did not restrain myself from using modern CSS, I’m working on a way to expand the compatibility to older browsers (Internet Explorer may be out of the question, however…), and instead of pixel graphics, I’m using low resolution vectorized versions with a similar style.

One of the biggest changes apart from the design is the switch from Hugo to Astro. The main reason for the change was because I’ve been having a much more positive developer experience in Astro than Hugo, and also so I can do a little bit of CSR, which is somewhat tough to do in Hugo.

At the end of the day, this should give you a very similar experience to the older version of the blog. And the philosophy of the blog remains the same: Striving to reduce as much bloat as possible. Astro helps a lot by striping away most of the JavaScript that other frameworks would throw in. So you can still browse this blog with Noscript or any other solution available to have JavaScript disabled, without any hiccups.

On that matter, I found a way to get rid of the YouTube player. Instead, now it’s using an alternative that also works without JavaScript! No more ads, no more bloat!

Here is an image of the Invidious video player that’s used instead of the YouTube one from the previous version.

There’s still work to do

This is how The Yonic Corner used to look like in the Hugo version. Note the dark theme.

There are still a couple things that are missing from the former version:

• The music player is not ready yet. I promise, I’ll make it work without JavaScript, like before. But I don’t discard the possibility of making a JavaScript one version to go along with the other.
• I’m still debating on whether I’ll add a dark theme or not. But if I decide on making one, I’d like to have a working responsive design first.
• I’d like to reintroduce RSS feeds sometime.
• Multiple languages like Spanish and Japanese aren’t top in my priority list, but there’s a chance I’ll add them back sometime.

There are also some new features I’d like to add to the site, as well as a few things I need to polish like SEO and some accessibility features.

	And don’t forget, I’m still here! The character system is still not fleshed out, but it works at the very least!