Welcome to the new mattgemmell.com

I’m excited to welcome you to the new-look mattgemmell.com, almost in time for last week’s release of Middleshade Road!

This is the first redesign in a long time, and the overall goal is simple: focus on books. I’m an author these days, and no longer a software developer or even a tech blogger (though I do still dabble in the latter area, and I doubt I’ll ever stop), but the previous site tried to straddle the line between those worlds. Now, this is an author’s site — with the blog aspect being secondary to my actual job.

Having said all that, I did insist on doing the redesign myself, from the ground up, and the visual style had its own guiding principle: enough. I wanted things to be clean and simple, without excessive functionality or visual complexity. Ease of maintainability is critical for me too. It’s still a statically-generated site, using the latest Jekyll and data-driven pages for my books catalogue, and the theme began with SimpleCSS as a base.

The site’s structure is very simple: there are my books, my main blog, my weekly short stories, and also a “secret” tech blog — which is secret in the sense that its posts don’t appear in the main blog index, but are readily found nonetheless (and are still present in the feed).

There are a few little touches I had fun with:

Full-width hero headers
Dark mode
Responsive layout
Mobile navigation
Book covers in pure CSS
Bookshelf display
Book accents
Series pages and accents
Clean article layout
Article footer

Here’s to the next phase of mattgemmell.com. Thanks for reading.