Pardon the Mess - Under construction.
When I decided to restart my website, I fell back into old design styles and habits. I’m a system administrator, but I do have a history of building websites. I’ve never been a great designer, and the restart of the site that I hand-coded looked ROUGH. It was a late ’90s mess of menus and unnecessary navigation. I laid the base design into a Hugo construct, pushed it to Netlify (thanks, guys, I get to have my site on the free tier!) and there it sat for more than a month, sad and old.
I like Hugo. It reminds me a bit of Blosxom - which was a hyper-minimalist Perl script that could run as either a CGI script or a static site generator. I ran that for quite a few years, and even managed to contribute a few useful plugins to the Blosxom community at the time.
But, I wasn’t happy with the design. It didn’t inspire me to write anything for the site. My ADHD-addled brain has entirely too many interests and obsessions to contain, but I just didn’t feel like writing inside what I had already built.
It wasn’t all hopeless, though. I licensed the rights to use Doves Type on the site - it’s absolutely GORGEOUS, and the letterpress work that came out of Doves Press is just so inspirational to me that I didn’t want to let it go.
Twelve Directions at Once
I’d been playing around with some of the agentic coding tools for a while, and even in the last iteration of this site I’d leaned on the tools to suggest CSS methods to improve the typography. Some even turned out kind of nice, but nested in my 1998-era navigation it stood out like a sore thumb.
So…. I had an idea.
I fired up Claude Code in a local copy of the site’s git repo and told it “This site is a mess. I love this typeface, and I want to focus the design around beautiful typography - please give me twelve designs that feature the typeface taking into account the content that’s already here.”
A few minutes later, I had a directory full of designs with a nifty index.
Some of them I wasn’t super enthusiastic about, but a few caught my eye. So I brought in the biggest design critic in the house - my wife - and she agreed that the ones I had narrowed my thoughts toward were best.
Bookplates are Cool
I finally decided on one that Claude labelled “Classical Book” - it leaned into the letterpress inspiration from Doves Press that had drawn me to this typeface in the first place. But the design was sparse, and didn’t really serve a website very well.
But I’m nothing if not a sucker for cheap tricks, so I went back to Claude and asked for a drill-down into the idea.
Narrowing Focus
I’m no stranger to working through web design - I’ve coded up a lot of designer’s ideas. I’ve lived a bunch of lives in web development, from massive static sites in HTML 3 held together with tables and bubblegum to the days of Semantic HTML and early CSS, but I’ve been away from that world long enough that I know when I’m beat. And I still wanted something pretty.
So I treated Claude like a human web designer and said: “Hey, Claude. I like that book treatment - take the general idea and give me five better realized site designs with actual navigation but keep the ideas of the core layout.
So Here We Are
You’re looking at the results. I’m actually kind of happy with what came out. I tweaked a few things, and added some nifty easter eggs for myself (like code blocks featuring my Mulled Cider editor color theme) and a little bit of sugar here and there.
Putting it Together
The site runs on Hugo with the PaperMod theme as a foundation. The typography is set in Doves Type as previously mentioned. And I’m not kidding - click through to Typespec’s site about it, and then do even more digging. It’s a revived typeface that at one point was lost - the founder of Doves Press literally tossed his entire drawer of type into the Thames. The story is wild.
What’s Next
I’m not sure. I’m diving hard into learning this new AI stuff. I’ll probably write a summary of my experiences with OpenClaw and what a ride that’s been, as well as some of the projects I’ve been working on. Some are just vibe coded experiments, but others are really carefully considered code, which takes me forever to write. I’ll keep posting as long as I can remember to come back here and write.
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’m not holding myself to a schedule. My brain doesn’t work that way, but I hope you come back.
Y’all have a good day.