My Past Site Themes

As far as I'm concerned, this site began (officially, anyways) on April 20th, 2024 when I chose the domain name. Alongside that, I chose a theme from a linkware site. Since then, I've used three different themes including the current one. I made the subsequent two myself. In the themes I make, I tend to avoid using images (aside from illustrations like Lulu) in favor of colors and text doing the aesthetic work. I hope to someday share the nine (so far) themes I've made for practice as linkware, but that's for the future. For now, here's a look back at this year's (three) themes.

Version 1.0 - FLN118 (April 20th 2024 - March 20th 2025)

I found this site’s first template on the Japanese-language site Foollovers. This large website provides free linkware materials, including both templates and various graphics to download and use with them. People colloquially refer to these as sozai (礎材) in Japanese. This translates as materials or building supplies. Or so I’m told? I wish I spoke another language, but I only know English. In this case, the materials are digital and free, provided you include (usually) a link back to the original source of the material (in this case, Foollovers). I made serious changes to the template (permitted by Foollovers’s linkware terms of usage). I made the content a fluid width, and altered how the menu appears on smaller devices. I changed fonts and the background, too, creating an effect that, while pink and frilly, had an edge to it, too.

Version 2.0 - Sea AND Sunset (March 20th 2025 - April 20th 2025)

Over the past seven months, I’d been trying to create designs of my own. These, unlike those available from Foollovers and other websites, featured no images besides illustrations. While I often use clipart, I don’t own an image processing program. I have Canva, but that’s it, presently. I wanted my site to have a unique design that I’d made myself, though, so I chose a favorite from those I’d been working on. I’d kept a lot of notes and comments in the source code of these designs, so it was very easy to set up, at least, even if I wasn’t in love with the result ultimately. I chose colors that reminded me of sand and the beach, but then again, I lack experience with beaches. The design is nice, yes, but it didn’t quite stick with me - something about the sidebar just wasn’t what I wanted. Perhaps it would work better for a different site. I ended up switching to another design after just a few months, and will probably post a variant on this theme for others to copy and use. I no longer have plans to use it.

Version 3.0 - Pink Lynx (April 20th 2025 - Now)

In February of 2025, I was preparing to put my own free linkware temples online for other people to crib. I was working on five or six other imageless templates for this. I ultimately found this particular one too charming to give up, and decided to use it on this site. As was the case with Sea AND Sunset, this one features no images besides the article illustrations, using text and CSS to create colorful effects instead. I’m really happy with the backgrounds, where a Javascript grabs the title of each page and dynamically scrawls it over and over behind the content container. The subtle text shadows and box shadows really pull things together, I think. I named this theme Pink Lynx but I can’t remember why, and if you are viewing this, it is likely that you see this theme currently live on the site. It’s actually one of several themes with similar structures but wildly different aesthetics that I created this spring, most of which I hope to make available as linkware.