Category: Site Design

I’ve imported my old archived posts dating back to August 2005, as I’ve been revisiting them and noticing repeating patterns that I think are important to reintroduce back into my website.

That said though, most of these older posts do not have their original accompanying images but I think I’ve got an archive somewhere of some of these images that I can add back at a later date.

Actually upon closer inspection, it looks I’ve got my work cut out for me, as there’s some other issues with the imported posts, like excerpts that were automatically added somehow. Not sure if this was an import issue or something that happened a while back (although I’ve revisited my older posts before and never noticed this issue then).

I’ve been playing around with my site design a bit, exploring different Google Font combinations and I think I’ve found one that I really like in terms of overall front-end style and readability but also with regards to backend writing.

I’m decided upon Lora for the body and Lato for the headings.

To apply this to my WordPress Twenty Twenty theme, I’ve added the amazing Twentig plug-in and then when customizing my site, I’ve chosen Twentig Options > Fonts then under Body I’ve set it to “Lora / Medium / Medium” (i.e. font / size / line height) and under Headings I’ve set it to “Lato / Black 900 / Tight / Larger.” I also had to set the Site Title Font Weight to “Black 900” under Site Title as well.

All said and done, I’m absolutely loving the look and feel of my single page layouts in WordPress now.

Next thing to tackle though is how my listing of posts are shown. Currently under Twentig Options > Blog, I’ve set the Blog Layout to “Stack” (which causes the post title and meta details to be tucked in tighter compared to the single page layout format).

While I may set the Blog Layout back to “Default,” I still want some way of visually differentiating long form posts from short form (micro) posts somehow, potentially even rearranging long form posts first and short form posts afterwards on listing pages (using either CSS or JQuery if need be).

Finally, while I’d also love to dive into full site editing with the Twenty Twenty Two theme, the user interface design and usability of it is just no where near it needs to be. It’s highly convoluted and confusing, especially compared to Squarespace’s interface. In fact, I actually find the old Version 5 of Squarespace to be much more powerful and easier to use, since you activated different focused modes (i.e. Content, Structure, Style, Preview) to work on your site.

So in Style mode in Squarespace Version 5, you could only stylize elements but the interface was way more powerful, yet simpler to use than the style interface in WordPress. That’s the primary problem with the WordPress full site editing interface today, figuring out the context of what you’re working on is extremely confusing and frustrating. However, once they do figure this out, WordPress will finally surpass Squarespace in both power and usability which is amazing considering where WordPress was a decade ago.

At the same time, it would be nice for WordPress to have a similar layout structure as Twitter. In effect, I like the primary feeling of my list view to be one of a collection of notes with the occasional longer form interjected within it.

Or perhaps the default list view just shows long form articles, with the option to switch to a notes list view. This lets the reader just see the essence of your work upfront but then also have the option to see how that work evolved bit by bit.

Update: I’ve figured out way to do this! Here’s how.

When I’m writing on WordPress, it feels like there’s this expectation to expand things to make it long form. On Twitter, since it’s short form, there’s no expectation. You just write.

It would be nice to replicate that feeling of Twitter into WordPress somehow.

In starting this new website, I’d like the flow of this thought stream (aka blog, journal, etc) to intentionally and directly solidify the structure of my Self and my work, similar to how sediment from a river builds up over time, creating a foundation to stand upon.

What this means is that anything that I add to this flowing stream needs to have some piece of itself that can be actionable and put to use in some way. Well that’s the primary intention anyways. Whether that can be realistically achieved is another story altogether, as sometimes when you’re first connecting with something new, especially on an intuitive level, it’s quite difficult to quantify and classify why it’s important at that moment versus understanding it upon reflection.

And finally, this doesn’t mean that everything I post here needs to be super serious either. For example, relaying aspects of my everyday life, also helps people to relate to me in a different, broader way. Or more appropriately, it allows people at different levels to relate to me on their level (i.e. conventional, post conventional, etc). Anyways, it’s always something I talked about doing with each new reboot of my site in the past but something I never really dove into that much but would like to do so this time.