The blog has a new face ! (And other news)
The last time this blog got a new design, it was in October 2021. Old, based on SimpleCSS with custom parts, having not followed Hugo’s evolution, and my tastes changing, it was time to put some new paint here.
The previous theme was mostly an enhancement of the first original one. This one is brand new, started from Hugo’s theme bootstrap (the one you init with hugo new theme mytheme).
What’s new ?
The main change is, obviously, the dark theme that got brighter. With the experience, I must admit a strong contrast with a black background and white, or light grey font colour is not easy to read. And since I’ve got fond of Nord’s colour scheme, as you may see with my Homepage, I’ve decided to adopt it for the Blog’s layout. The display font has changed too, from Mozilla’s Fira Sans to Droid Sans. I prefer this one, Fira sometimes had some readability issues IMHO.
Some other things, a left panel that will render the table of contents, tags, and other links. The layout is also responsive for mobiles and the front page remains low on bandwidth usage. I’ve removed some unnecessary contents such as the links page I didn’t maintained and updated my Uses page.
There’s still room for improvement. I’m not satisfied by the footer which is too big, I should find a way to arrange the items in a proper manner. Some styles are missing, such as tables, but I don’t use them a lot.
So far, the theme as not been released as open source yet. I’ll wait for the last adjustment, if I don’t forgot.
Some other news
January was quite a month for me. I’ve moved to a new home during the first week, it was long and never ending, I was happy when I’ve finally emptied my previous apartment. The old one has been sold at the end of January, the last step for a now completed project. However, I currently have a limited Internet connection (4G Home router, nice but annoying monthly data quota, and bandwidth can be capricious). FTTH is arriving in March, I can’t wait ! Finally, I’ve also started a new mission at work. This one is pretty demanding but also very interesting.
During my vacations, I’ve been able to progress in my “Working with Generative AI” article series, the last was about Stable Diffusion : how does this work, how I use it, some best practices I’ve identified, limitations, etc. Unfortunately, I’ve never had any answer from the online IT news site I’ve proposed too. I must say I’m quite disappointed since they offered the possibility for community contributions, but providing no answer for a subject, even a “no” would have been enough to me, is not cool. Sad.
Anyway, I’ll look forward on a way to publish these articles that took some time to write. I’ll also take an opportunity to add a supplement regarding Infomaniak’s LLM offer. As a kSuite subscriber, I’ve access to kChat which integrates their AI assistant as a chat bot. The tool is also available in the kMail client. I’ve applied to the wait list for the LLM offer too, so far no news. Since I could test their LLM in the Chat, I would say it’s quite interesting. Mostly because it’s based on Mixtral, an open source model produced by the French company Mistral AI. As a person trying to avoid Big Tech companies as much as possible, it’s a good opportunity to use a more local service.
Regarding my fiction writing hobby, I’m currently developing a new story. The project is on a very early stage but the ideas are starting to assemble. I’ve also started to publish on XinXii library (I didn’t knew it, a German company) that can also publish on Google Play Book. But after submitting my books their, I still can’t find them while they’re available on XinXii. I don’t understand why… Whatever.
And that’s all for now !