A month of rebuilding

In the August update I promised that the site would be redesigned as we went. A month later, most of that list is done, and the site looks and works quite differently. Here’s what changed, and what’s coming.

A new look

The minimalistic look from early August is gone. The site now has its own colour scheme: a dark charcoal frame around a warm parchment reading area, with terracotta and pine green as accent colours, and a serif font for headings.

Posts now have cover images, shown on the post cards and when a post is shared on social media. Posts without their own cover get a J-Cave default image.

The post lists adapt to your screen: two columns on most screens, and three or four on large ones. On very wide screens the ads have moved out into the margins, so the reading area stays clear.

Easier to find your way around

• The Categories menu now shows the subcategories, for example Servers and Networking under Homelab.
• Category pages show a breadcrumb, so you can always see where you are and step back up.
• The menu highlights the page you’re on, and keyboard navigation has a proper visible focus.
• Longer posts get a table of contents and an estimated reading time.
• Old links from the WordPress days are redirected to where the posts live now, and a missing page shows a proper “page not found” page with a way back, instead of the web host’s bare error page.

Contact page

The contact page works. You can send me a message directly from the site, and you’ll land on a thank-you page here rather than somewhere else.

The Homelab Guides are live

The biggest news: my first guide, Homelab Handbook: Getting Started, is out. It’s a practical handbook for turning an affordable used PC into your first homelab, and I’ve written about it in its own post. The guides now have their own home here on j-cave.dk, which collects everything about the series, including the deeper write-ups on the software the guide covers.

Posts since August

Honestly: none, until today. The time went into the site itself. That changes now. The backlog has been researched and outlined, and the plan is at least one new post a week, and two or three a week for the first couple of months. Among the first up are several series:

• Proxmox from scratch, from installing Proxmox to VMs, containers, storage, networking, backups and PCIe passthrough
• Nextcloud at home, starting with running it on Proxmox
• Home Assistant and ESPHome, from getting started to building your own sensors
• Microsoft 365 for a small business
• More on my own home servers, and the home network

What’s still to come

From the August list, better SEO and more categories have started, but comments and community options are still to come, as are the non-IT categories like gardening and building. Next on the design side is better styling for lists and links inside posts, and landing pages for the remaining categories.