New Year, New Blog Theme

New year, new blog theme — and a snowstorm to stir things up. What began as a spontaneous idea turned into an all-night website overhaul, full of bugs, stubbornness, small wins, and too much tea. This isn’t a tutorial. It’s more of a ramble. But if you’ve ever faced a blank screen and felt stuck in your head, maybe you’ll find a kindred spirit here.

Keep reading if you’re curious how a minor blog refresh turned into a full-on winter escape plan — and what happens when you stop waiting for perfection and just… begin.

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So — new year, new me.
And hey, new blog theme too.

I finally ditched minima, the classic theme that everyone and their Jekyll-using cousin starts with. It’s solid. But I wanted something more… expressive. A site that felt like me. Or at least, a version of me.

Now I’m using minimal-mistakes. I’ve known about it for a while — kept meaning to try it, then kept not doing it. Classic. It wasn’t until a snowed-in Friday, a colleague calling it a “POW day” (prisoner of weather, not war), that I cracked and gave in. One part boredom, one part stubborn spark. I figured, why not?

It started with updating a config file. Then cloning the starter repo. Then spiraling into a full migration until 5:30AM. Somewhere between the third cup of tea and fixing my navigation bar, I realized I was having fun. Or something like it. Not quite joy — more like gritty satisfaction.

I won’t lie — there were bugs. Lots of them. Timestamps, tags, formatting. My posts felt like fragile paper houses and I was the wind. But piece by piece, things clicked into place. The new homepage looks like how I’d always imagined it: clean, personal, a little mysterious.

Now there’s a table of contents. Reading time estimates. A comment system. Even share buttons — including custom ones for WhatsApp and Email (which I had to hack in myself). I spent way too long tweaking those icons. But now they sparkle. They work. There’s pride in that.

Is it perfect? No. It’s not supposed to be. It’s meant to breathe. To give me space to write — even messily — without overthinking the frame it lives in.

This wasn’t a redesign. It was a reset. A little back massage for the blog, done entirely for me. Because sometimes, the most satisfying kind of progress is quiet and unseen — but you feel it all the same.

Thanks for reading. I’ve got a fitness benchmark tomorrow. Let’s hope I survive it.