Light Mode in Progress

Today—the day after I finished up a “16 weeks condensed into 4” Spanish class—I happened to read some folks on Mastodon talking about light themes on websites.

I’ve been wanting to add one to my site for years, my brain apparently wanted a project I could reasonably accomplish make noticeable progress toward within a day, and I vaguely remembered having seen other Minimal Mistakes theme users discussing how to implement this.

Thus far today I’ve managed to have my Jekyll-based site correctly generate two different themes: the dark one I’ve been using for years and another light one that’s basically the default theme with a couple of colors switched out. That’s a success!

Currently this site defaults to my regular dark theme, but will serve a light theme if it sense that you have “prefers light mode” set in your browser or operating system.

Today’s work also lays the foundation for adding a toggle. That’s successfully building toward a future success!

There are going to be some surprises along the way to a fully-featured light mode, such as noticing and also fixing the fact that the Bigfoot pop-up colors aren’t really legible at the moment. I’ll need to figure out how many of these things I can avoid hard-coding in the future. But it’s nice to finally work on it, even if doing so was somewhat of a surprise today.

Update

As of 2023-10-12, I’ve mostly fixed the things I had noticed with the theme. (They were inaccessible text and background colors related to footnotes and notices.)

My next ambitious stretch goal will be to make a few user-selectable themes, like Sarah L. Fossheim has done on their site. I’m also considering a move from Bigfoot to Littlefoot for the fancy pop-up footnotes.