Why did I make my blog uglier?

Last night, I completely revamped my blog. This morning, I showed it to my wife and siblings, hoping they would appreciate the new look. However, none of them liked the updated aesthetics. Despite their opinions, I couldn’t care less. I absolutely adore the new appearance and here’s why:

• Improved writing experience: my blog is built on Jekyll, and every time I made a change, it took about a minute to refresh the page. This slow and tedious process hindered my writing flow. However, now the refresh time is less than a second, enabling a much faster and smoother writing experience.
• I just have what I need. Before I had a navigation bar, a search box, light/dark button, and a lot of other things I wasn’t using. Maintaining all these extras became burdensome and slowed down any changes I wanted to make. Now I just have a couple of html templates and that’s all. This gives me a sensation of solidity in the software sense about my blog and I don’t expect to have weird bugs that are difficult to solve due to code complexity. Now I own all the parts of the project, which relieves me and avoids unnecessary worries.
• The blog is designed to avoid distractions. Before the blog was full of colours and buttons, which in my ADHD opinion diverted attention away from the essential elements: the text and ideas. I wanted to create a design that focused on eliminating distractions and keeping the focus on the content.
• It’s 100% mine. Before I was using a standard Jekyll template (Chirpy), but now all the code is mine which gives me a strange feeling of satisfaction. It’s entirely my creation, and that alone brings me joy.
• The blog is prettier. Although everyone claims that the blog is uglier, I can’t help but believe that it has become much more beautiful. I love simple aesthetics and blogs direct to the point. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t appreciate simplicity without any thought given to style like Dan Luu’s blog, I believe that the right amount of CSS makes the reading experience much better. For example, one of my favourite blogs in terms of style is this one.

If you like it, feel free to just copy the code from here. Besides the simplicity and the style, it has some cool features such as an automatic blogroll generation based on your favourite blogs ;)

PS. This is how my blog used to look before last night