The New bluesabre.org

Behold! And welcome to the new bluesabre.org! If you’re a regular, you might have noticed that the site has had a bit of a facelift. After nearly a decade of publishing with WordPress, I’ve moved to Ghost. And so far, I’m impressed.

What’s New?

It’s faster. Ghost is fast without any help, providing all the publishing tools I need and (from what I can tell) none that I don’t. To further speed things up, I’ve optimized all of the images on my site for small download sizes and super-fast loading.

It’s more open. Ghost themes, powered by Handlebars templates,  are significantly easier to maintain than WordPress themes, and you can really go far with the default Casper theme. I’ve forked the theme with minor enhancements and made it available on GitHub. Meet Mouser.

It’s more consistent. Years of blogging included various headers, layouts, and custom CSS. With this move, I’ve standardized each page and post for a less jarring reading experience. Oh, and it now supports dark themes (as sent by your system or browser).

/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable --force-dark-mode

It’s easier for me. Goodbye plugins, hello everything I need just to write. With a nearly upstream theme, an unmodified core, and no plugins, I can worry about other things like development, blogging, mentorships, and community engagement. It all gets better from here.

What’s Next?

With this site migration finally over, it’s time to get back to work on Xubuntu 20.04 LTS “Focal Fossa.” There’s a lot of work to do and only a few months to do it. In particular, I’d like to get some appearance items out of the way.

• Greybird-Dark, the new dark variant of the standard Xfce theme, is in master and is ready for an initial release.
• We should be able to add the Greybird themes to the gtk-common-themes snap package, enabling a consistent look for Snap packages in Xubuntu.

In the comments below, let me know what you think of the new site. As for me, back to work, I go!