Website Version 3.0: A Fresh Look & General Modernisation
I've spent the last few months reworking the FAB INDUSTRIES website. With a refreshed look, most things should still be familiar. The content stays the same. There's one big change, however.
After several months of hard work, this update of the site brings a new theme that, while providing a fresh look, should still be familiar to anyone who’s visited this site in the last six years. I’ve done my best to go to something that feels fresh, but also stays within the design language that I have established for the site in the past. Here are the major features of the new theme:
- Improved navigation with categories, article series and tags
- Client-side search function — much needed these days since Google’s results are getting worse by the day
- Three different colour schemes:
- Newsprint ‘72 — a light colour scheme
- Synthwave ‘84 — a dimmed colour scheme with vibrant highlights
- Usenet ‘95 — a dark colour scheme (the default setting)
- Social sharing buttons for individual posts
- A cleaner blog front page
- Emoji support via Hugo’s built-in functions:
😗 🤠 🦉
- The site should render and cache better on mobile browsers now
- The site is now using the Iosevka font
for preformatted text and code blocks; all other text is still presented in Inter, of course - Many other new features, like better third party embeds, built-in Mapbox maps and fun layout stuff like these informational boxes:
New Commenting System
The only major change that affects you directly with this new version is that I’ve changed the commenting system for the site once again. After implementing Webmention-based commenting with version 2.2 a while ago, I am yanking that again. Not enough people have used it and some readers have written to me, expressing utter confusion about the system. While I still like — and very much support — the whole IndieWeb idea, it is clear that it’s not in a state that is usable for most people. Since I need a comment system with a lower barrier of entry, I have decided to implement giscus. This commenting system uses GitHub Discussions to store website comments and reactions.
When giscus loads, the GitHub Discussions search API is used to find the Discussion associated with the page based on a chosen mapping (URL, pathname, <title>, etc.). If a matching discussion cannot be found, the giscus bot will automatically create a discussion the first time someone leaves a comment or reaction.
To comment, visitors must authorize the giscus app to post on their behalf using the GitHub OAuth flow. Alternatively, visitors can comment on the GitHub Discussion directly. You can moderate the comments on GitHub.
Since I don’t want to store comments myself — and would be hard-pressed to make this legally viable even if I did, with laws being what they are in Europe these days — I thought that outsourcing this to Microsoft was acceptable. GitHub gives me a good platform to help moderate comments and giscus is open source. Additionally, I observed that many who have interacted with me on my website in the past already have a GitHub account.
If you do not want to use GitHub or Microsoft decides to censor you for some reason, you can — as always — use email to get in touch. If you request this, or if I find a discussion to be particularly interesting for all readers of the blog, I will highlight it with a post in the new Correspondence category.
To be clear here: If you do not use the commenting system, the only cookies that will be stored on your system are an empty giscus cookie and a cookie from my site that remembers that you clicked through the initial cookie banner.
Work in Progress
As part of the work to get this new theme up and running, I had to touch every single piece of content I have ever published on this blog. I am not done with this yet, especially on the German side of the website, so some content might still be missing from the blog index or might be shown in a somewhat broken state. Over the next few weeks, I will fix all of this, but after working behind the scenes for so long, I decided that it was more ciritical to get the new version of the blog out there as soon as possible. I can now get back to writing new content and will fix the old stuff alongside that.
On a side node: In the process of coming up with the new colour schemes, I created a dedicated colour palette for the website and all of FAB INDUSTRIES. I am quite happy with it.
