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New Site

I redesigned my website

  • personal

I built the theme that you’re looking at right now from scratch and relaunched my site. The theme isn’t quite finished, but it’s good enough for use in the wild, what with perfect being the enemy of the good and all.

Quick history

The first version of my personal web presence was heavily focused on music—a WordPress.com site under the title ‘Musical Prose’, which I began as a way to prepare for (distract myself from?) my doctoral candidacy exam. I didn’t write much, and what I did write is partly gone, following an unexpected motherboard failure and a poor backup retention strategy on my part. I’ve recovered parts of many of those posts thanks to the venerable wayback machine, and will post some of them here for posterity (along with some program notes I’ve written, which are already up), although musicology is no longer a main focus of mine.

I put the website on hiatus in 2014 to deal with some health concerns. Indeed, I went on a hiatus.

I relaunched a landing/contact page in summer 2015 built with Grav, which was still at version 0.9 at that time. It sat there for several months, until the autumn, when I threw up a post a bit like this one and a ‘deliberately positive self-assessment’ that I had come up with. Looking back at it, it’s a little hand-wavy-ooey-gooey, and I’m no longer convinced by some of the business speak that crept in, but I mostly stand by it. I’ll revisit it and write a post about it.

The site sat there for nearly 5 years, gathering dust on the internet, while I continued to dust myself off, in a matter of speaking.

Two thousand twenty-one (2021)

Over the last couple of weekends, I built a custom theme for Grav CMS from scratch. It’s a work in process, with some work required to allow users to toggle between light and dark mode, to expose more configuration options to the admin interface, and a few other odds and ends that I probably haven’t thought of yet. I think I’ll write up how I went about it in some more detail when it’s done. The theme requires no JavaScript, and I haven’t used a build step or CSS preprocessor.

The logo is an SVG of my initials, ISG, in Morse code—a little hommage to my training in and love of music & sound. The colours are all cribbed from this abstract painting by Kazimir Malevich:

Suprematist Composition (1916), Kazimir Malevich
Suprematist Composition (1916) by Kazimir Malevich

Stay tuned; be well.