This website is made with Hugo, sprinkled with some AI pixie dust and hosted on Github Pages
Font Sources
The default body font is Oxanium. Headlines are formatted with Probert. Sidebar links, preformatted text and code snippets are rendered with Berkeley Mono. I also use Berkeley Mono as my preferred font for terminals and code editors.
Oxanium and Probert fonts evoke a futuristic space-explorer feeling while looking neat and tidy. All of these fonts, including Berkeley Mono, are stylistically inspired by the Eurostile font designed in Italy in 1962. Unfortunately, the latest versions of Eurostile sell for ~ $500 US.
Honorable mention: Matrix. I haven’t used this font on the website but it’s one handy font for fans of The Matrix. I very nearly used the Matrix code rain as the background for the dark theme and the website logo.
Dark Theme and Interlace Background
The website defaults to a dark or light theme based on your system preferences. The light theme uses Probert headings everywhere but the dark theme has a couple of surprises.
The dark theme appearance is a homage to the VT220 terminals on which I fell head-over-heels into C programming. A few years ago I bumped into a TrueType version of the VT220 font, called Glass TTY. I knew I just had to use this font for the dark theme.
Another surprise with the dark theme is a code snippet in the background. It’s just a shell script I wrote around the same time I was building this website. The script copies image files from memory cards while tagging them and organising them in the right directory structure — signifying a blend of my interests in coding and photography.
Lastly, the dark theme would’ve looked much less convincing without the interlace effect in the background, which I adapted from here
AI
I’ve incorporated little bits of input from Github Copilot and ChatGPT, mostly to help with Hugo templates and CSS.
Starter Theme
Before I started hacking on my own theme, I had to start off of a working base. I used this theme as the starting point, although now I’ve deviated a lot from it.