This site is built on WordPress (*audible groan*) using a custom theme I designed and built starting with the no-style Blank Slate theme. I worked for a WordPress company early in my career, and have always appreciated the platform for how it allows people to own their own site and control everything about their content and design. It’s been a fun challenge to keep the same site going on here for so long (since 2008), just rewriting the theme and design over time. This recent rebuild (August 2022) is the first time I’ve rebuilt the theme from scratch since my son was born in 2015. I kept a lot of the design and content the same, but added some sections (like Reading and a rebuilt work section called Projects).
Frank Chimero wrote an article in 2014 called Homesteading that really resonated with me at the time (I linked to the web archive version here because it’s ironically no longer on his website). I decided to build onto my site to be more than a portfolio or a blog, but a place to keep track of things I enjoyed or wanted to remember. So it’s really more for me than anyone else, but I guess you can look at it too. This has come in handy over the years when I try to remember an article or a quote. Last year I added books I’m reading to the site. I built the Books page as a static page to track my reading progress for myself, but this year I built it into a WordPress custom post type (which has pros and cons vs. just custom HTML).
Typography
Headings and various accents are set in Gooper Semicondensed by Very Cool Studio. I love it dearly. I’d had Gooper on my “someday I’ll find a project for this” fonts list since it was released, and decided a redesign of my site was the perfect excuse to buy it. Paragraphs are set in IBM Plex Sans by IBM, because I’m very tired of using Inter for everything.