Ever since the creation of my site, I've wanted to have a blog. I finally have the time, and the result is what you see here. I'm aiming to post extremely occasionally - mostly long-form content about computing, design, and other fun stuff.

My aim with the design - which takes clear inspiration from a variety of other sites online - is to be simple, but not overwhelmingly so. In my opinion, a lot of blogs nowadays chase after a trendy minimalistic aesthetic to the point of unusablity.¹

If you've visited this site before, you might notice that some other stuff has also been changed. Being the perfectionist that I am, I wasn't really happy with the site's design from the moment I made it. In fact, I pretty much scrapped my initial design and started over again before uploading anything.² I'm still not completely happy with novov.neocities.org 3.0, but it has to be finished sometime - right?

I had a few goals in mind with this endeavour:

• Reduce the amount of unnecessary verbiage. I tended to waffle a bit and detract from the actual content on each page.
• Put my own content first, as opposed to stuff I like. My aim here is to make the site more "professional" (not to an unwelcoming degree, though), so I can comfortably host any future projects on it.
• Make the design more welcoming and easier to read. Some of the old pages, with their tiny high-contrast text and tight spacing, slowly became off-putting in my mind. I've changed from EB Garamond to Crimson - while the former is a great font, it is a bit distracting for long blocks of text, and I like the "sharper" look of the latter. Also, a clearer hierarchy in the page design has been instated, rather than having everything float in whitespace.

I'd say I succeeded with most of them, but I'll probably disagree with myself come six months. Hopefully you find it better, or at least equivalent. I'm not sure how well a new blog will work out with my meagre social media presence, but I'd like to say I've tried.

I'm not a fan of the "2020 sucks!!!" cliche - partly because it was a much better year than 2019 for me, and partly because many of the struggles that it's known for have always been taking place for the underprivileged. But I can't deny that things aren't looking good. Inequality is rising, authoritarianism is looming, and the future generally looks uncertain. The landscape hasn't changed, but it is changing. So take care of yourself if you have the means.

• 1

  If you've wondering what the weird icons are, they've alchemical symbols. I'm no alchemist, but I think they look neat. All of them have a meaning relating to their topic - see if you can figure it out.

• 2

  Early visitors may recall an intermediate design for the homepage with a blue background - a 2.0 before the 2.1, if you will.