I rebuilt the site.

Again.

This is not an April Fools joke. I simply got tired of looking at the old layout, got tired of some of the broken assumptions in the header logic, and got tired of the site feeling more cluttered than the writing on it.

So here we are.

  • New layout
    • The site is now much simpler overall.
    • The old side structure is gone.
    • Navigation is at the top where it belongs.
    • The menu system is now split into layers instead of trying to expose every single thing at once.
  • New colors
    • I removed the old theme switching.
    • The site now has one brighter engineering-ish palette instead of pretending that six half-maintained themes was a good idea.
    • It is flatter, cleaner and easier on my eyes.
  • Posts are easier to read
    • The content width is more responsive.
    • Summaries on the front page use the available space properly now.
    • The general spacing and alignment should be less weird on desktop.
  • Header system changed
    • The old sticky header stack in long posts was clever, but it fought with the new sticky nav and had a few structural problems.
    • It has been replaced with a progress-style document header.
    • It tracks where you are in the post and shows the current section path.
    • It works with up to 4 heading levels.
    • It also behaves better with direct links into long articles.
  • Harmonics rebuilt
    • The old static string harmonic chart is gone.
    • It is now a generated harmonics tool.
    • It is much closer to the thing I originally wanted in the first place, which was "show me the useful information" and not "please admire this pile of static images."
  • String Tree added
    • There is now a tool for the stupid little note your string makes behind the nut.
    • It now combines the tight one-string view with a supplementary What else rings? section underneath, so the local afterlength problem and the broader first-order resonance view live in one place.
    • It also distinguishes plain and wound strings instead of pretending every string is the same solid rod.
  • Meta Analysis added
  • Cursor Scaling added
    • The old mouse CPI transfer calculator now has a proper app version.
    • It compares source and destination displays, accounts for effective scaling, and computes the destination CPI that preserves physical cursor travel.
  • Latency added
    • The site now has a practical latency app for buffer size, monitoring path, plugin delay, air distance, and heard-total estimates.
  • Miscellaneous cleanup
    • A lot of stale CSS has been removed or rewritten.
    • Some template structure has been simplified.
    • The site should be less fragile in the process of future updates.
  • DAW Chart rebuilt
    • The rebuilt DAW chart is now the main DAW chart instead of a numbered prototype page.
    • It now combines profile weighting, inline matrix editing, sticky editing controls, and EDN export in one place.
    • The old numbered chart variants have been folded down so there is one DAW chart entry point instead of three.

If something looks wrong, the first thing to do is clear your cache and reload the page. This site has a habit of teaching browsers bad habits and then I have to hear about it.

Contents

Why bother?

The old design had accumulated the usual web disease: layers of decisions that made sense at the time, then stayed around long after the reasons had evaporated.

Some of those layers were mine. Some were simply artifacts of a site that has been around long enough to survive multiple bursts of energy, disinterest, redesign attempts and feature creep.

The biggest practical problems were:

  • Navigation had become awkward.
  • The layout was busier than it needed to be.
  • The old long-post header behavior was colliding with newer sticky navigation.
  • Too much CSS existed purely because something weird existed before it.

That sort of thing tends not to improve on its own.

What changed?

The top nav is now the primary navigation.

That sounds obvious because it is obvious, but the site had drifted into a state where too much discovery was pushed into secondary areas. The new approach is:

  • Primary destinations are always visible.
  • Secondary navigation is still present, but grouped into a menu system instead of living everywhere at once.
  • Random Wisdom stays visible, because it amuses me and because several of you seem to enjoy it.

Post navigation

The old in-post heading system has been replaced.

Instead of headings pinning themselves into a stack at the top of the page, long posts now show a compact progress header that:

  • indicates the current section
  • shows the section path
  • tracks deeper heading levels
  • stays out of the way better

This is especially useful on giant review posts and comparison posts where scrolling 9000 miles down the page can leave you wondering what subsection of which subsection you are actually in.

Styling

The new look is intentionally more restrained.

I wanted something that felt closer to engineering paper and technical documentation than a blog theme showroom. So:

  • stronger contrast
  • less decorative nonsense
  • fewer giant tinted surfaces
  • less visual noise in navigation

There is also a very slight old technical manual/drafting vibe in places, because apparently I enjoy that sort of thing.

Harmonics

One of the more useful side effects of messing with the site again is that the old String Harmonic Chart is no longer just a pile of static images pretending to be a feature.

It now generates the fretboard view directly and lets you:

  • choose the open-string frequency
  • choose a fretted position first
  • inspect the natural harmonic nodes relative to that shortened speaking length
  • view an idealized spectrum / amplitude graph for the result
  • check the pitch and cent relationships without having to do mental arithmetic like a maniac

This is much closer to the thing I wanted when I first made the page, which was "show me the actually useful information" and not "look, I successfully stacked PNGs."

String Tree

The other big tool addition is String Tree.

This one exists because a lot of guitars and basses have enough string length behind the nut to ring at a real pitch, and that pitch is not random even if it initially sounds like it is.

The top half is the local view. The lower What else rings? section is the follow-on view.

So the page now lets you:

  • choose a common instrument preset or enter your own scale length and gauges
  • calculate string tension from the scale length, tuning, plain/wound state and wrap-material approximation
  • enter the pre-nut string length and calculate the note you get behind the nut
  • compare the harmonic ladders on both sides of the nut
  • see where those ladders line up closely enough to plausibly excite one another
  • then drop into the supplementary What else rings? section to see the immediate first-order response elsewhere on the instrument

In other words, the site now contains a tool for the strange little chime between the nut and the tuner because clearly I have become exactly the sort of person who would spend a large amount of time building that.

It is still the local view first, but it now also carries the broader What else rings? follow-on underneath, so the one-string and instrument-response views live in the same place instead of pretending to be separate tools.

Meta Analysis

I also added a generated Meta Analysis page for the site itself.

This is the archive turned inside out a bit. It tracks things like:

So if you have ever wanted a page that says "apparently more images strongly tends to mean more words on this site" or "here is objective evidence that my taxonomy drifted over time", that now exists too.

Cursor Scaling

I also turned the old mouse CPI transfer write-up into an actual Cursor Scaling app instead of leaving the idea trapped in an old article with an inline calculator.

It gives that idea a proper tool:

  • source and destination display comparison
  • UI scaling awareness instead of pretending raw panel pixels are the whole story
  • destination CPI recommendations
  • physical cursor-travel comparison instead of just pixel-count handwaving

The older post still exists as the explanation, but if you just want the tool, the app is the better entry point now.

Latency

I also added Latency.

It pulls the practical pieces together:

  • manual path math for buffers, plugin delay, and heard total
  • beat-relative timing translation instead of raw milliseconds only
  • a hideable browser-report section that asks Web Audio what the current output path reports

That browser report is kept separate from the manual model on purpose. It is useful as a browser-side sanity check, not as a fake DAW latency detector.

DAW Chart

I also finished the rebuilt DAW Chart and made it the only DAW chart page that matters.

The old numbered prototype split was useful while I was iterating on it, but it had become clutter.

The current page combines the useful parts:

  • live profile weighting
  • inline matrix editing
  • sticky edit controls that stay usable during long-scroll edits
  • synchronized EDN text export
  • cleaner mobile and desktop behavior while swapping edit modes
  • a single canonical DAW Chart URL instead of three competing versions

What did not change?

The content is still the content.

This is not a strategic pivot into lifestyle branding or some other horrible fate. All of the same posts, pages and strange side projects are still here. The goal was to modernize the presentation and reduce friction, not to sand off the personality of the site.

What else changed?

That's to come. If you recall all my issues with jekyll then you might wonder what insane thing I did to overcome such an issue.

Meta

This post took:

  • 5 years to redesign the site.
  • Too many additional hours to fix the consequences of redesigning the site.
  • Several days to rework the document heading system without making long posts worse.
  • 3.5 hours to write this update.