How do you like the new look? I’m pretty happy with it. I even made a new banner. Look at the effort that went into it!

Banner - 2012
Old
Royfuss
New

In 2021, I made some changes, but did not move away from the Mantra theme. The theme was good to me for over ten years. Alas, they stopped updating it, not to mention the web has changed a lot since 2012. I decided it was time for a revamp.

I spent a lot of time browsing themes, and researching them online. Nothing jumped out at me. I decided to spin up a test environment, and import my blog into it. I tested a few of the more highly recommended themes to see what kind of customization I could make. I was not happy with any of them, until I tried QI by Qode.

I did not think I would like it. It’s a “freemium” theme; I was able to use it for free, but some customization is locked behind their subscription plan. However, the customization options are fairly robust in the free version. I was able to tweak most things to how I wanted them. However, there were a few minor things I could not change. Luckily, the PHP template files and CSS are all editable with WordPress. I was able to make additional tweaks without too much hassle. There was one thing I could not change, and that was the formatting of the meta data for each post. I would have liked to have a more “human” feel to it, like “By Royfuss on [DATE] [TIME]” and then list the tags. Unfortunately, the CSS does not allow a differentiation between the author/date/tag elements.

It took a little bit of time to get used to. I like how it looks now. I like how it performs on mobile. I am happy with how easy it was to change. It does pose a new project: what about my older archives? I started on this project. The changes I made last year is making it easier, but I am being even more ambitious now.

First, I wanted to attempt the look and feel of the WordPress site, going so far as making sure it is mobile friendly as well. I decided to revisit Pico CSS for this project. “But, Roy, didn’t you hate Pico?” No, I did not hate Pico. I hated trying to stretch the skin of the of the Royfuss Games site onto it. My archives are a lot different. They are just blog posts, and it turns out Pico is very good with blog posts. I am surprised at how much the archives look like the WordPress site. I cannot wait for you to see it.

With the look of the site done, why is it not uploaded? Because I decided to mimic WordPress further, and have one post per page. I manually separated a few of the posts from the rest of the page HTML to get a feel on what could be streamlined with Python. I have 120 blog posts in the archives, so manually doing it would take a long time. With the work I did last year, I was able to parse out the posts using Python without any problems. I had the script spit out each post into individual HTML files. The script also did some formatting stuff. However, I still needed to go through each HTML file manually to make some changes. I found a few posts missing <p> tags, and other weird formatting issues. I needed to make these changes manually, but the script definitely sped things up. Afterwards, I wrote I script that imports those HTML files, and generates pages I created to match my theme. It turned out great!

I am working on navigation right now. Because everything is hard coded HTML, I do not have a search function. Google takes forever to index my projects, so I need a few options. I have it where users can navigate to the previous and next post from the post page, but I need something more global. My script is now able to generate pages with 10 excerpts per page with links to the full post. This mimics the WordPress site. This is good, but I still need more. I am working on a script to generate monthly archive pages, which is also similar to the WordPress site. On top of all that, I need to redo all of the links on the Index Map.

Actually, I will need to update everything single link I on my other sites to pages in the archive, which is a lot. Luckily, I have scripts that can inventory all of the links on my sites. I will also have to update some of my scripts I use to search the archive site.

I am hoping to have the archive site done soon. I want to do something different for the Games of Appendix, and Games of Remaster pages. I have not decided it I want to clone the archive site to those pages, or if I want to try something different. Whatever I decide, I cannot wait to show you.