## Making it my own
Since switching over to Gatsby (see my post here). I have been using the Novela theme. It's basic, and has some cool features like a light mode/dark mode switch but it's nice to make something your own.
Showcasing my posts
The homepage of a blog should be where you showcase all your posts. It's often known as an index - somewhere where a visitor can see everything and take their pick of what they want to read. In keeping with that, I thought it would be cool to have a kind of "shuffling" effect as if someone were leafing through my posts like a selection of cards. Partly inspired by the homepage of CSS-Tricks I built the overlapping cards that move aside as you hover over them. Originally the card you hovered and all cards after it moved to the right; bringing the one you selected into view using CSS Sibling Selectors, but I came across some overflow issues on smaller laptop screens. So instead when you hover over a card, I use JavaScript to target all preceeding cards and give them a class which pushes them aside to the left. This is much more scalable, and is more of flashy effect.
Animations and Transitions
Another thing that I always love to put into any websites I build are animations. So naturally I had to put some in my blog. I've already explained above the card animation, but I also added some cool interactions in the header area on the homepage. If you look carefully you'll see behind the main heading a small area of colour. As you move your mouse left-right and up-down it reacts by moving slightly in the direction you go (sorry mobile users, you won't be able to see that one!). As well as that, it uses the x coordinate in the HSL colour system to change the hue and make a rainbow effect as you move left to right.
That's it for the homepage, but you may have noticed I also added some page transitions. I'm a huge fan of making websites feel like mobile apps, and so I used a sliding transition like you might find in iOS when moving between screens.
What about writing?
Yeah, it's been a while since I wrote - and it's a trend across my blog historically that I don't write very often. I'm not making any promises, but maybe I'll start putting more effort into regular writing soon enough! For starters I want to write a bit more about some of my personal life outside of Web Development, so keep an eye out for that 😁✌️