I tend to change up the look of my website. Which almost always correlates to how stressed out I am at the moment. I find writing HTML and CSS rather soothing. Here’s a hint, if the style is pretty bland, I’m particularly overwhelmed. I wasn't the best at keeping track of all the changes but I did my best to resurrect at least the most notable ones.

Pirate!

This was the first theme I used AI, Claude, to put together. I was interested in figuring out its capabilities in manipulating SVGs. The screenshot doesn’t do the layering justice, you should really check out the demo. The links don’t work but you can see the waves move under the ship, the dark and light theme, and it was responsive. I don’t think anyone spotted it while I had it as my theme (or at least no one mentioned it). This theme had a Konami easter egg at the bottom (you’d need to scroll all the way down to see it in action, desktop only).

Book Theme

I didn’t have this one up for very long. I decided that, while cool, I didn’t like how it interacted. The book effect is mostly CSS that I found on CodePen. I couldn’t find a way to break apart posts to fit on the “book page” cleanly. Even when trying out a bunch of JavaScript to slice and dice the content. So I switched it up. Again there is a small demo for desktop you can check out. Because of the interaction the theme needed a large screen and the mobile styling was plain. However, the book did have a light mode and a dark mode that I thought was neat.

The original desktop theme

This one was fun and nostalgic and oh so busy. I loved how it way layered. I ended up redoing this one with more JavaScript, but this was simple and cute. Check out the demo.

The pastel parallax theme

I was curious about how one puts together a parallax background on a website and that lead me to make my next theme. I found some free graphics and tossed it together over a weekend. I like the color scheme.

Here is a basic demo of the theme. The links don't work, but it does let you see the parallax effect as you scroll.

The original retro RPG theme

This was the first custom theme I added to my website which at the time was hosted on Micro.blog which uses Hugo as its theming engine. The screenshot doesn't capture it, but there were emojis floating up the screen that I changed out seasonally. I also had a blue checkmark image as a nod to the ridiculous "paid checkmark" feature that twitter introduced around the same time.