Welcome To The Coven!
Introduction §
Welcome to the long-awaited rewrite of my personal blog!
It’s been 2 years since I touched the source code for my original website, and unfortunately in that time it’s fallen into decay, the source code sitting untouched for some time for a multitude of reasons.
One of the main reasons for undertaking a re-write is I have changed a lot in the two years since I first started having my own blog. I have gained 2 years of experience and knowledge in fields like accessibility and web development, I became a regular contributor to the GNOME ecosystem, especially in the last half of 2025, I picked up playing music for myself and with friends in late 2024. I am now (thankfully) out as a transgender woman to everyone in my life, and can use my website as a proper portfolio, rather then just as a nice home page for my friends to whom I was out the closet to. I began University in 2024 and gained a lot of web design experience in my second year, creating 2 (pretty nice) new websites in a short period for my group. In short, my previous website did not really reflect me or my passions anymore, and it sat untouched as the changes in my life added up.
Another reason I undertook a rewrite was due to the frankly piss-poor architecture of my original website. My original website was all hand-written HTML and CSS! After it expanded a little, I tried to port what I had done with handwritten HTML/CSS to Zola, a static site generator. A static site generator, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a tool that takes markdown files, and some template and configuration files, and compiles them all into a set of static websites. In short, cutting down on the boilerplate and repeated code I would need to type every-time I made a new blog or subpage on my blog.
I undertook the port to Zola in an attempt to make it easier to add new content to my blog, but it resulted in my website not taking full capability of the advantages of using a static site generator. I also disliked some parts about Zola, compared to other options like Jekyll and (the static site generator I eventually used in the rewrite) Hugo.
On May 8th, 2025 I started rewriting my website, after creating a few designs in Penpot and getting feedback for their design by my close friends. This first attempt got about 80% to completion, but sat as I ran into a couple issues with making my website, and was overall unhappy with how some of the elements in my original draft of the rewrite came to fruition. One example was my portfolio:
My old portfolio for Upscaler. It contains an image with 2 Upscaler windows, the image comparison mode in the left window, and the queue in the right window, with a description underneath. A pink border around it surrounds the image and description, with the project name and tags above the border
I did not like the style of surrounding everything in large borders, the every portfolio item alternating between pink/purple was incredibly hard to do, and do well. I also didn’t take full advantage of things like subgrids in CSS, to allow me to make elements that were the full width of the page, while keeping the rest of the content dead centre.
I also had trouble with making my page mobile responsive. I had a lot of new ideas for my blog, but never had time to get round to any of them, because I had to spend most my development time squashing bugs as I refactored large chunks of my website as my knowledge on Hugo and web design rapidly grew. I eventually let the rewrite rot for a few months, all while my original website was actually taken down for indefinite maintenance by my original hosting organization.
On Janurary 8th, 2026, exactly 7 months after the rewrite was started, I picked up it up again, starting more or less from scratch, but resuing some components and most of the content from the first rewrite. I was armed with all the knowledge from my university group project’s websites, and inspired by my fellow GNOME contributors websites, including but not limited to:
In just a couple of days, I managed to create something I was much more proud of. This can be seen within my portfolio page, for example:
A screenshot of the top of portfolio page, with the laptop running GNOME and the section for Cartridges.
I also managed to add many features and improvements I did not manage to first time around (all done with HTML/CSS, no Javascript!) such as a proper mobile menu, with animated drop downs and an animation playing when the button is clicked, a list of icons for my smaller GNOME contributions, instead of having an entire item dedicated to each, wasting vertical space, an adaptive friends of the site grid, and a cute little graphical of GNOME on a laptop at the top of my portfolio in the same style as Tobias Bernard’s and GNOME’s front page, screenshots switching from light/dark mode in the portfolio based on the users OS preferences and more.
Overall, I am very proud of not only the results of my second rewriter, but how I managed to complete it in less than a week. I am happy to finally have a permanent place to call my own again, and share my GNOME development and thoughts in a place thats more collected and less ephemeral than something like my Fediverse account or (god forbid) a Bluesky or X account. Still, I have more work to do on my website front, like a proper light mode as pointed out by The Evil Skeleton, and to clean up my templates and 675 line long CSS file!
For now, welcome to the re-introduction of my small area of the Internet, and prepare for yet another development blog by a GNOME developer.