New look for my website

I just changed the look of my website, and I’m pretty happy with the results. The site still runs on WordPress, and I built a child theme from Matthias Pfefferle’s SemPress theme.

One of my main goals was to make my site a bit more fun and expressive, which I’ve accomplished in a few ways:

1. The new header uses ASCII art wrapped in an SVG. Because ASCII art is just text, it’s a bit challenging to make it responsive. Putting the heading inside an SVG allows me to fluidly resize it for different screen sizes. This ends up being a nice hybrid of old and new — ASCII art was an early method of representing graphics on computers, and SVG’s popularity on the web is much more recent. The ASCII art itself was generated by patorjk.com’s ascii-art generator.

2. Continuing the theme of old and new, the navigation menu uses the Meyrin font, which was created to resemble the terminal font in the Line Mode Browser — the first popular web browser. More about the font here and it’s worth checking out its use in CERN’s browser-based emulation of the Line Mode Browser

3. The background image for my site is a photo I took at Nanzen-ji temple in Kyoto.

Still a few bugs to work out (e.g. the header doesn’t display quite right in Safari or on Apple mobile devices), but I’m happy with the new look.