A new year always makes it tempting to give things a fresh look, and this time the blog has gone through another redesign. The current template is much cleaner and more open, and a big part of that comes from a friend who released the theme he had been using as an open-source project on January 1, making it freely available for others. A lot of bloggers already know his work and like the template, but what stands out even more is the writing style behind it. The theme itself feels carefully made for reading and writing, and if you end up trying it, giving the project a star on GitHub is a nice way to support the author.

Of course, everyone has their own taste. Something that looks great to one person may not feel right to another, and I am no different. So even after switching to this theme, I kept making small changes here and there to better match what I wanted. This is what the updated homepage looks like now:

One noticeable change is the site-wide emoji style used by the new template. Going forward, the plan is to stick with a simpler emoji system. Because of that, all of the older emojis in past posts and in the comment section have already been removed. That also explains why some old comment replies may now appear blank: in some cases, the reply had been nothing but an emoji, so once it was deleted, there was nothing left to display.

The records page has also been rebuilt. Previously, every movie entry showed its image directly, and although those images were not especially large, they still had some effect on page speed. After moving to the new template, I rewrote the related plugin as well. Now movie information can be added directly from the backend, while the frontend displays it through HTML+CSS instead of relying on all those images. The result is tidier, more consistent, and easier on the site.

There was a painful lesson during that process. I am not especially skilled at coding, so I used ChatGPT to help adjust the plugin while building it. The data was stored in JSON, and after a few tests everything seemed fine, so I started entering old movie ticket records one by one. At first it worked normally. A few minor bugs appeared from time to time, but those were fixed as I went along. Then, right when it seemed almost finished, the real problem showed up. Once the total number of entries went past roughly 50, adding a new item suddenly left only two records in place and all the earlier entries were gone.

That was the moment when the phrase “data is priceless” became very real. Since then, every single change has been backed up locally, with no limit on how many backup copies I keep. Only after doing that was I able to re-enter everything from scratch, and I also took the chance to add the movie tickets from the past two months.

Plugin backend

The links page is the last major change. For now, it directly adopts a layout from another blogger's links page because it happens to fit my own taste quite well.

Since quite a few people had recently left comments asking to exchange links, it is worth mentioning this again: the current blogroll will remain as it is for the time being, and there are no plans to add more links right now. That may change someday if I come across a blogger I really like, but for now it will stay limited.

This theme will probably stay in use for a long time. There will definitely be small tweaks and touch-ups along the way, but nothing too drastic is likely to change.