Oh, hello. Something's different around here, huh?

Yup, it's been a few years, and I decided it was time to refresh the look around these parts of the indie web. The main impetus for this change was the simple fact I have too many projects I want to direct people towards (good problem to have?). Also, I was annoyed by how just like so many other themes out there, my previous design was pretty image-focused, which is not exactly ideal for a blog that only has am image on like 5% of the posts.

I'm now using a theme called Thesis which I think looks great and has some great features that I can take advantage of to make Birchtree a better landing page for everything I do. I have a lovely audience of repeat readers, but I also get a lot of traffic from people finding me from other random places on the internet, and I wanted to make it easy for those people to find more of my stuff they might like. I'm also utilizing feature posts in Ghost, something I've never used before, so that I can flag articles I am particularly proud of to appear at the top of the home page so new visitors hopefully find the good stuff rather than whatever I've been rambling about recently.

We now have a dark mode setting in the UI!

As is my way, I've already gone into the theme to change a few things that aren't to my liking. A few wording tweaks and just about 100 lines of CSS edits are all I've done so far, but if history is any indication, I'll be transforming this into my own thing over the next few years.

Oh, and I have kept my typography choices from the previous design intact: Atkinson Hyperlegible Next is the UI and body text, and Bebas Neue Pro is my headline font.

Finally, if you're on a desktop monitor with a pretty wide window, you'll get a new 3-pane view (look ma, I'm basically an iPad app!) which makes it dead simple to bounce around to different posts I've written recently. It's basically an RSS reader with just my stuff. The dream!

Anyway, as always, let me know if you like it, don't ruin my day if you don't, and hit me up on Mastodon with any bugs you find along the way! Link in the sidebar 👌