The Dungeon Has a Look Now

When I moved this blog onto a NAS in a cabinet at home, I used one of Ghost's default themes and told myself I'd fix it later. My friend Hiran got there first. He told me not to build another news-style blog that looks like every big company's site, because a personal site should look personal, even a bit irreverent. He sent me to Dead Simple Sites, a gallery of small personal websites, and that's where I found Jake Przespo's.

Jake's site looks like someone arranged a desk of index cards by hand. Every post here is now a pastel card, slightly grainy, set down at its own slight angle. Hover over one and it straightens up, as if someone has picked it up to read. Each card gets a filing code built from its tag and date, so #HO260924 is a Homelab post from 24 September. It's a library catalogue for a blog nobody asked to be catalogued.

I built it with Claude, over more than thirty versions in about a week, and most of those versions fixed things I'd broken myself. One evening I shrank every font because they looked enormous on my phone, then found out the phone was showing the desktop version of the site, zoomed to 125%.

The floating menu at the bottom is borrowed from Hiran's own site, and then I kept adding to it. On a phone it hides on the way down a page and comes back with a small wobble. The Everything + button opens a panel of links, and its plus turns into a minus. That took four attempts, because I wanted the vertical bar to actually rotate.

Two pages are new. Now is a month-by-month log, one card per month. Scatterthoughts is a wall of one-liners, things I'm reading, code that annoyed me, quotes, and song lyrics with a small play button. The cards pack together like notes pinned to a board, and photos on them lean the opposite way to the card, because a photo on a real pinboard is never straight either.

Most cards get a random pastel. Some get to be red. I added bold colours after deciding a pastel wall needed a way to shout occasionally.

The light switch is in the footer, and it's a lightsaber, red in dark mode and blue in light. Click it and the blade powers down, the new colour spreads across the page from the hilt with static crackling along its edge, and the other blade ignites, with sound if the speakers are on. It takes two seconds, which is about a second and a half longer than a light switch needs. I regret nothing.

I'm releasing the theme for anyone who runs Ghost. I emailed Jake first, since the whole thing started with his site. He said yes, and was lovely about it, which after a week of staring at his work was the best reply I could have hoped for.

It's called Dungeon, after the NAS, and it's on GitHub, free, under the MIT licence. It even keeps itself up to date here. When I push a change, GitHub builds a release and the NAS installs it on its own. The cat, who has already killed a PlayStation and a pair of earbuds, has not been consulted.