Website updates November 2022 🚀
- django, website
- 30-Nov-2022
I have been switching between backends and design for a while now 🤨 but the whole point of this is experimenting and learning something new so why not ?
I recently wanted to implement first, a new design which is more visual.
So what changed?
Visual Look and Feel
Initially, I used some random photos about Switzerland from unsplash. That method is no longer working and it crashed my blog😕 lesson learned: do not rely on external calls for important photos so I moved to a photo collection from Swiss Open Data:
Historical Photos «Vues de la suisse» by Adolphe Braun & Cie. provided by the Swiss National Museum: In the middle of the 19th century Jean Adolphe Braun inspired the imagination of the European bourgeoisie with his photos. From the 1850s onwards, more and more people had the financial means to travel. However, very few people had their own photographic equipment, so they bought photographs on site. Soon a flourishing business with pictures and photo albums emerged. The company Braun & Cie was led by Jean Adolphe Braun and his son Gaston in Mulhouse, Alsace, and specialized in landscapes and cities. Their pictures of Switzerland spread throughout Europe and shaped the country's tourist image. As a "by-product", they also documented the emergence of infrastructure in the Alps.
I found these photos very fascinating and a good fit with the new colour scheme (brown with the same shade defined by Apple in iOS 16).
Fonts
Of course I had to improve the fonts too :) Now using GT Alpina as a Serif and GT Haptik. I think both provide a good fit and makes the whole blog easy to read. As a plus these fonts are made by a Swiss foundry.
Backend: Django
I enjoyed a lot experimenting with GO and also with the static version of this website. Having photos loading randomly and dynamically is not really doable with a static site (unless you do a lot of twist and turns with an API) and in Go the implementation is not as easy and as clean as in Django 🐍.
In fairness, I just don't know enough of GO to be independent and without begging for code and solution on stack overflow. I am still using Go in another site and is certainly very powerful and great. But if you don't know enough (like in my case) you might get stuck writing a lot of code for something you can do with 1 line in Django.
So I am back to the origins, hopefully here to stay 🚀
Perhaps the whole result is not much but is... 100% made with ❤️