Having got my site working, I also wanted to customise the Cayman theme, which is thankfully CC0 1.0 Universal licensed.

The theme uses SASS for styling, which makes CSS a ton easier with useful stuff like variables, the ability to make simple colour adjustments and so on.

It’s been a fair while since I touched anything front-end related, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that modern CSS in modern browsers is easier to work with than it used to be. That said, I’m sure I’ve made some egregious mistakes.

I ran into a couple of very frustrating issues: my SCSS files (extracted from the theme then edited) were being completely ignored, until I realised I’d made a small typo in one of the filenames. Gem-based themes can have any of their files replaced by one that matches the name exactly, but anything that doesn’t match exactly is (understandably) ignored.

I’ve updated some colours and tested them at WhoCanUse to ensure good visibility for a variety of people, moved a few bits around, updated to the latest FontAwesome glyphs as I wanted Mastodon icon, and picked out some fonts I like better.

I chose Raleway for body text and most things as I find it very readable (please let me know if you don’t!) and just a little playful (look a the delightful ligatures on ffl, and that w!), and Cabin for headings as I prefer it at larger sizes and heavier weights.

I’d like to look at using something like Jekyll Responsive Images or Jekyll Picture Tag but nothing I’ve found yet works out of the box on GitHub Pages, so I’ll forego that for now.