New Blog Design

It’s been around 10 to 15 years since the last time this blog’s design changed so it seemed like it was due. The cover image is from a gorgeous spot on Lake Moogerah which has the most amazing sunsets. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel out there for a few Church small group retreats and it’s always very special. Such a wonderful place to slow down, spend time with God and appreciate the beauty of his creation.

This is also the first time I’ve redesigned the site since AI got good and wow it made it a lot easier. It’s a relatively bland design with the cover image providing pretty much all the personality but that’s true of every other design this site has had too. It’s a content focussed site, not a showy design one and I am definitely not a designer. Even so, being able to have AI pull out matching colours from my photo, deal with all the sizing details, write the actual Hugo theme and pull it all together made it a snap. In fact, I was just instructing an OpenClaw agent from my phone via Slack and it sent back image mock ups to start and then published a private version of the site for me to test.

Beyond my website, more and more I find I’m getting good results from just telling AI to “make it pretty”. Great designers will always have a job, but there’s an awful lot of stuff that previously got no styling or design at all that is now way nicer because AI makes it easy. It may just be lipstick on a pig, but the pig still looks a lot nicer than it did.

Oh and it implemented search which was lost when I moved to a statically generated site.

P.S: The link to slot finder is now in the footer. Hopefully this doesn’t cause delays for the next Ethereum hard fork.