Website Refresh

As with so many things I tend to work on, I'm often spending more time on the tooling, rather than doing any productive (*read: creative output*) work. This website is no different. Instead of writing more, I have spent the past few days simplifying the templating structure, and I also took the opportunity to update the website theme. The result is a fairly streamlined Hugo theme that I hacked together with bits and pieces from other^ websites^ that I liked^, together with a bunch of my own changes.

It is far from perfect, but it is at least closer to what I would like this online corner to become. The previous theme (dubbed *mystery forest v2*) has been replaced by a minimalist light theme, as I feel that the focus should always be the content. I'm not completely satisfied with it yet but in the spirit of updating the site a bit more often, I'd rather publish something now instead of pondering on the details for another 2 months.

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Apart from that, the site is still the same: a very lightweight, static website with about a 12kb average page load, no Javascript, no tracking (not even server-side) and no comments - but I'm always happy to get comments or feedback by email^. I care a lot about privacy and this is the type of website that I would prefer visiting.

My aim is to also update the site a bit more often. This means that I might sometimes write some shorter-form articles, as I usually get stuck writing long texts that then never get finished.

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On a personal level, I'm doing fine. Work does sometimes stress me out and my anxiety pops up more often than I would like, but it's manageable. I am looking forward to an upcoming 2 week Christmas holiday, during which I can hopefully regain some energy and focus, because both seem to be at an all-year low at the moment.

I'm currently also planning a hiking trip to the UK's Lake District in 2024. A week or so without tech and away from everything, with just my hiking boots, surrounded by nature and draped in the beautiful light of the skies of Cumbria. Very much looking foward to that!

It reminds me of the poem by Thomas A. Clark^, called *In Praise of Walking* (excerpt):

What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way.

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Convictions, directions, opinions, are of less importance than sensible shoes.

And with that, dear reader, I leave you for another time.

                                    ⁂