Redesigning the blog

In which I use Codex to fake my way into web design

October 12, 2025

I got tired of my blog design

I like that it was simple, but it feels too.. big? Rough? The content is rough, but the design doesn’t have to be.

My blog before the redesign
My blog before the redesign


Everything looks too big!
Everything looks too big!


So I decided to install Jekyll from scratch.

The default Jekyll them
The default Jekyll them


And I initialized Codex on the blog’s folder, to give him some instructions:

The project is a Jekyll blog that will be published in GitHub Pages. Modify the styles to give it a modern but simple theme.

The first modification didn’t work, and no styles were applied to the blog. I screenshoted the result to show Codex (I didn’t keep the screenshot):

Now the blog shows with no styles at all. You can see a screenshot in the file ./blog.png.

Once this was fixed (I was vibe coding, so I didn’t even try to see what was wrong), the results were much better:

The post card overlaps with the header
The post card overlaps with the header


There is a small glitch in the UI. In the main page, the first post card overlaps slightly with the header, so the card is cut on the top. If I hover the mouse, the card raises a little and it is shown in full. Can you fix this?

Despite taking a screenshot, I didn’t attach it to the conversation, but Codex fixed the issue (despite the grammatical errors, I don’t use Grammarly for the prompts!).

Now I wanted to add an image to the header:

Put an image as a header background

There was a bug inside the posts, with the images overflowing the layout on the right:

The posts have images in <figure><img> tags. Make sure that images have a limited width so the fit into the page layout

The first version showed the tags in the posts, but no links and no tags page:

Modify the code so when you click a tag in a post it brings you to a page where you can see all the posts with that tag

Codex decided to show all the tags in the header, so I asked Codex to fix it.

The blog shows each individual tag in the header. Change this to show a single Tags option in the header, linked to a page that displays all the tags

Finally, I added an Archive page:

Add also an Archive option, listing all the pages by date

And that’s it. The result is this design (in case I decide to change it in the future):

Not great, not terrible
Not great, not terrible


I’m going to call this design “3.6 roentgen”: not great, not terrible.

Update on Octuber 19

One more change: non-serif fonts for the headers, serif fonts for the regular text:

Fonts change
Fonts change


Update on November 25

Ok, a few more changes.

Images!
Images!