Chris Hannah

I find it funny when I see YouTube videos with people showing off their “minimalist” EDCs. It’s usually a mix of wireless headphones, some complex wallet, key accessories, multi-tool, weirdly a knife is normally included, pen, notebook, water bottle, usb stick, handheld games console, etc. Most of them time, everything being in matte black.

It’s something that I think really shows off how much of a bubble most tech people live in.

When I leave my house, whether I’m going to the shops, out to London, to a restaurant, etc. I carry three things: phone, wallet, and keys. My wallet has three things in it, a bank card, drivers license, and potentially a few notes. And I only have 2 keys, so that’s also pretty minimal.

I’m not trying to argue with what people need with them, I just find that type of video as a general source of humour for me.

I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts online today, and one thing that struck me on quite a few of them was the readability of the page.

I found myself enjoying blogs that had rather minimal amounts of “stuff” on the page above the article contents. Instead of a big logo and a long list of navigation links, most of them had a small (but identifiable) blog title, a few links, but then straight to the post.

While I’ve been a fan of minimal layouts for a while, I always had the idea that I needed to have as many links as possible in my navigation menu. And my name had to be huge to make sure that everyone knew who the person behind the blog was.

But since doing a lof reading of others blogs, I realised that I was designing it for myself, rather than for any potential readers.

So based on this, I’ve made a few small adjustments:

• I’ve swapped the big animating title into a small title in the top left.
• The (single) advert has moved to the bottom of the post.
• The navigation menu has shrunk and is inline with the title.
• The meta information on a post is more clear, and I will look to add reading time to this soon.
• Post titles are larger when viewing specific posts.
• The dark blue colours used for dark mode have been replaced with a more neutral tone.

You can view the new design on my blog at chrishannah.me. But here are a few screenshots:

No doubt I’ll be making a few more tweaks in the next few days, but I do hope that the new design is more usable for readers.

I went to see the Cursed Child play in London just over a week ago, and I planned on writing a big review. But that never actually happened, so I thought I’d at least write a short overview of what I felt about it.

Some context:

• I’m not a massive theatre lover.
• I’m a massive Harry Potter Fan (books, films, games, etc.).
• I was always going to see this at some point.
• I saw both parts in immediate succession.

I wouldn’t go so far as to make this a new years resolution, but this year I think I’m going to try and write shorter, but more regular, blog posts.

Too often last year, I held back posts because I wanted to make everything into a really detailed piece. But that can hold me back sometimes.

When I get that small piece of insipiration for a post, instead of letting it attrack dust in the drafts folder, I need to get it written and published. It might mean that some potentially big pieces get broken up, but at the same time, I think it will mean a higher output.

After some final touches, my custom theme is now usable.

I’ve named it Pure, and that’s mainly because I wanted very minimal styling, and to have it be a pure version of a theme. For the benefit of it acting as a “starter” theme for people that want to maybe want to start tweaking a theme but don’t want to start from scratch. But also for people (like me) that sometimes just want a clean and simple blog.

Not that it matters to anyone else, but I specficially structured the HTML so that even without CSS, the site will look correct, and be totally readable.

It’s a single column layout, and it’s very bare-bones, which is by design. However, I’ve tried to style it in a way where it still looks relatively modern, while keeping a minimal feel.

For a full preview you can check out my microblog, and if you want to see the code or to use it yourself, then you can find the theme on GitHub.

I’ve added minimal CSS to my new Micro.blog theme that I’ve started to work on.

It adds:

• Better spacing for most elements.
• Single column layout.
• Stylised hr elements to split header and footer from main content.
• Sets font-family to sans-serif.
• Dark mode support.
• Horizontal menu with spacer between items.
• Lefthand border for blockquote elements.
• Styles all links with an accent colour and no text-decoration.

In it’s current form, I’m happy with everything except the link colours. For those I’m conflicted whether it should be one colour everywhere, or the default browser colours.

It should be ready for use, but before I start claiming that it’s officially ready, I just want to test a few more things like photo pages, code blocks, and maybe comments.

However, if you would like to test it right now, you can find the theme on GitHub.