# I redesigned my site

DevFeed: [I redesigned my site](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/i-redesigned-my-site-35540.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://meowni.ca/posts/redesign/>)

Author: Monica Dinculescu

Published: 2021-06-24T00:00:00Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Monica Dinculescu](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/monica-dinculescu.md>)

Topics: [Website](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/website.md>), [generative art](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/generative-art.md>), [Web Components](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/web-components.md>), [HTML](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/html.md>), [JavaScript](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/javascript.md>), [Jekyll](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/jekyll.md>), [GitHub Pages](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/github-pages.md>)

Tags: [components](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/components.md>), [generative-art](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/generative-art.md>), [github-pages](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/github-pages.md>), [html](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/html.md>), [ibm](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/ibm.md>), [javascript](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/javascript.md>), [jekyll](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/jekyll.md>)

## AI overview

The author explains why they redesigned their personal website: they were publishing fewer blog posts, wanted to showcase generative art, and replaced an outdated emoji custom element with a simpler implementation. The site continues to use Jekyll through GitHub Pages without a build step or minification.

## Source excerpt

The last time I changed something big on my site was 3+ years ago. I was really into gradient rainbow text and IBM Plex Mono. It was a mild increment over whatever I had before, which was just a cleaned up and colourful version of Left from like 6 years prior. Anyway, what I'm saying is: this website had hella split ends. Here's the before and after: ↓ But also, why? I used to write a lot of blog posts, so my website was very blog focused. Originally the home page was just a listing of posts with some copy sprinkled in. As the pandemic hit, I started writing fewer and fewer posts, so having the one post of 2020 show up as a listing was ridiculous. On top of that, this year I started focusing a lot more on making generative art and I thought it was sad I wasn't showing that anywhere on the site! The beauty of generative art is that you can just keep generating it over and over again, and my site was a long white column of text. No more! git diff Ok so hear me out, this looks bad and that's because: it is bad. One cute thing my old site had was a <emoji-rain> custom element. You pressed it and got a rain of emoji. Brilliant. The problem is that I wrote that in like 2017, and used the well deceased v0 version of the web components spec. As a result, it had a gazillion dependencies (rip bower_components) and polyfills and ancient trash. 23906 lines of trash to be exact. Gooood riddance. The added 1580 lines are a bit of a bore: 100 of these are this post. another 300 is the HTML Ipsum from CSS tricks because I'm always scared I'm going to break a style on some ancient post. 300 lines of JavaScript for the header art that I don't minify because I'd like to be able to read this in the future to fix whatever mistakes past Monica made, and I don't have a build step set up. I'm still using the Jekyll that comes out of the box with GitHub pages and I am never looking back. the rest is actual code that I touched! There was some really horrifying markup on the project/talks/tem