Welcome to the new-look richardcheesman.com website. I’d been meaning to update my website for a while, as I’d been put off using Wordpress as it’s started to pile in the AI “tools” through plugins, has made some questionable decisions regarding content management that I could not get on with, and found the way it stores posts in the database was horribly inefficient (basically creating a complete copy of the post on each saved edit).

I’d originally dabbled in Hugo a while back and had created a minimal website for a while. It was handy being able to copy the markdown files from that original site to this new version with almost zero editing apart from configuring some of the heading stuff to update the tags, etc.

The aim was to create something unique for me, but using an existing template. After much searching and testing, I ended up using the typo theme and doing some modifications to it to suit my needs. After that it was a case of just reformatting some of my images to suit the new format, checking the content through and fixing a few typos and other content placement issues.

One of the things I wanted was to give a nod to influential designers, and figured a great way to do this was to use colour. In particular I decided on trying to find a palette that gave a reverential nod to the legendary Dieter Rams and his work in various products for Braun. I eventually settled on the scheme shown below, with a few minor variations between some of the colours to ensure the text is legible.

I’m rather pleased with it, and it’s so nice to have the simplicity of just using flat text files (well, markdown files anyway). Even though they are markdown, they are extremely readable without needing special tools to read them, like a database for example.

There’s also the joy of having zero AI slop in here either. I’ll be writing some posts on some of my thoughts on AI at some point as well. There’s plenty of observations on the impacts of AI that have been the subject of study as well as my own thoughts on it’s impact on society - I’m currently still reading through a lot of data that has been collected on this.

For the future, I’ll be adding some form of comments system (probably Disqus or an analogue of that), a non-intrusive and non-Google analytics - because I have no tracking at all to see who reads this. In fact, this second item may not even make it, unless the comments become quite active and then I’ll be more interested. I’m working on getting the tags page up and working properly, but I’d like to add a counter for the number of posts per tag and sort by alphabetical, which it currently does not do. I also need to add some photography pages, so a nice gallery viewer won’t go amiss there.

Plenty to do, but I am happy with where the site is currently at now.