Something new is brewing!

(updated )

Source

Pardon our dust — a redesign of /dev/ncdulo is underway! Read more and catch all the details.

While I was happy with the Bootstrap4 template on /dev/ncdulo — I was feeling a bit like I wanted something slightly different. The design just was not fitting the content in my mind. This disconnect was starting to leave me some problems where I felt I could not envision what I want properly. No matter how much I tried digging through Bootstrap4 template, I could not figure things out the way I wanted.

Let’s just start over again. Something simpler.

BootBlog4 was actually the original theme I had planned to go with. It was simple, plain, and looks great right out of the box. Not perfect. But the lack of flashy features, and simpler design means my perceived level of effort to change things up to fit my mind is lower. This is a good thing. I can happily hack away and actually have an idea of what I’m doing.

So I went ahead and installed my own copy of BootBlog4 into the project that manages the Nikola back-end over here, and have been banging away at the keyboard since. Not massively quick progress. I’m starting to understand it though. And very much liking the progress I have been making.

We are not all there yet. And as of this writing, I’m still not at a point where I want to actually deploy anything. Couple loose ends to tie up before that. I do plan on getting a rough draft finished up, along with some better design choices compared to my previous attempt. Then deploy, and continue tweaking the small bits over time.

As of right now, the main areas in need of attention would include:

  • The footer’s gray background does not extend the full page width

  • Featured posts no longer include preview images (Feature, not a bug!)

    • May be possible to add the preview images back, but use them as a container background image instead of side-by-side. The side-by-side was screwing things around and leaving scrollbars where they should not be.

    • Jumbotron does not look as nice as it should — colors

  • Sidebar should include category, archive listing

  • Column widths may require additional tweaking

  • Fonts should not include Google. Use System UI Stack.

  • Need a proper color scheme. For real now.

After much frustration, and failure

I just cannot seem to get things working properly in terms of color changes. The “proper” way to handle this would be to download the Bootstrap4 source code, modify the SCSS files, and rebuild. For whatever reason Node.js just flat out refuses to properly work. My own lack of understanding there is more than likely the culprit. Just more fuel to the fire that is my growing dislike of Javascript over the past twenty years.

For now, I’m going to keep hacking away at is. Progress will likely be slow, and unfortunately, I feel the color scheme is going to be the last thing I manage to get set up properly. Even the web-based tools I have tried seem to be failing me.

Moving forward — I may be able to compile the SCSS on it’s own without using Node.js. If that continues to be an exercise in futility, my last ditch effort will be manually overriding the Bootstrap4 CSS directly. I recognize that is not the best way to do so, as updates may break my changes. If that’s how it is going to be, so be it. I will make this work, somehow.