Site Redesign
As you can probably tell, the site has been redesigned for 2020. It has been 7 years since I made the initial design and I felt it was time for it to be refreshed, as well as provide a better experience for readers on mobile devices. I used Bulma for the CSS framework and VueJS for interactivity.
I really like working with Bulma, I find it has a more simple grammar than Bootstrap and is more tweakable as well. The elements and components that can be made aren't as feature-rich as Bootstrap, but overall I find that I don't need them for what I do. I used Bulma first on my resume and since that was a breeze, I have started using it on other projects as well. But I held off on using it on this website as the original design wasn't my best work, so I had to first bush-whack through bad Sass and HTML. Thankfully, ripping out Bootstrap and replacing it with Bulma was so easy that I got it done in 4 hours.
As for VueJS, it is used sparingly on the website. I don't want to place too much of a load on people's browsers, especially on mobile, but I find that adding VueJS is so simple that the benefits of simple interactivity outweighs the added page weight (HTML, CSS, JS, etc). I'm basically using it as a replacement for Middleman's data feature, which works totally fine, but is a build-time concern whereas I want it to be a runtime concern (as in, manipulating the data while being displayed on the website). One place that VueJS is being used is in the quote box on the sidebar (mobile users, you can't see this), and I think it turned out quite nicely…and without the pain of horribly messy JS code. If you view the page source, you'll see that it is using a <quote></quote> custom tag.
The new design is intended to adhere to my minimalist ways, and it is custom designed by me. I find that a bit difficult to say, because I don't consider myself a very good designer, but this is an attempt to put that behind me and push on regardless. The mobile version is lighter from a UI perspective, as most people don't need the extra weight of a sidebar, so I simply chose to present a simplified version of the site for mobile users. Basically, mobile just gets right to the point of why you are here. The best part of a redesign is that it makes me want to write more and visit my own website, since I'm not staring at a 7 year old design (with all its inherent flaws only I can see).
Hopefully you enjoy the new design and if you do like it or can suggest some improvements, say so on Twitter.