It’s been quite a while since I last updated my website, and it has become rather outdated, so I’ve finally decided to update it.

The new website uses Jekyll with fully custom hand-written HTML and CSS. This change supports this new blog (markdown is nicer to write than HTML, although I might prefer \(\mathrm{\LaTeX}\)…), which I hope to use to practice writing in a relatively low-pressure context. The content will mostly be technical, since I love algorithms and solving technical problems. The topics will probably be rather eclectic, since my interests seem to bounce around somewhat chaotically. Right now, I am obsessed with physically-based rendering (the above image is a result of this obsession), so perhaps I will blog about that.

The new website design is quite similar to the old one. The biggest changes are that I’m no longer using a light font weight for the main text and that the socials/navigation links are now embedded in the header. I still like the larger-than-standard font size, the 960px default width, and the use of a serif font for the headings. The fonts used are now Source Serif 4 and Source Sans 3, through the Google Fonts API. The layout is simple enough that it adapts to small screens almost entirely without CSS media queries, which are only used to turn off justify alignment and un-float post preview images.

The most difficult part of the design to implement was positioning the date of the post in the header. The date is supposed to be right-aligned on the last line of the header if there is space, or on the next line if there isn’t. Sounds simple, but to the best of my knowledge CSS doesn’t have a way to position an inline element within a line like that. I tried using flexbox and floats, but those weren’t able to achieve the desired vertical alignment. Ultimately, my solution was to have two copies of the date, one which participates in flow, is hidden, and sets an anchor, and another which is absolutely positioned to be right-aligned at the vertical position of the anchor.