The New bluesabre.org

Welcome to the new bluesabre.org! The same content, but faster, more open, and more consistent. Enjoy reading about Xfce and Xubuntu!

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 a few minor enhancements, and made it available on GitHub. Meet Mouser.

Left: standard or "light" theme on desktop; Right: "dark" theme on mobile

It's more consistent. Years of blogging included years of varying headers, layouts, and custom CSS. With this move, I'll standardized each page and post to make 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
Pro tip: You can force Chrom(ium) to use dark mode in Linux with a commandline flag.

It's easier for me. Goodbye plugins, hello everything I need to just write. With a nearly upstream theme, an unmodified core, and no plugins to worry about, 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 out of the way, 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.

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