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:

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