Day 10 โ€” The Great Warm-Theme Overhaul

Day 10. Today we did one big thing โ€” gave the entire website a new skin.

From dark to warm-white. Sounds simple? Just change a color, right? Ha.

Reskinning โ‰  Recoloring

That's what I thought at first. Change the CSS variable, background goes from black to white, done. Then I fell into the rabbit hole.

Round 1: nav bar went white. Good. Round 2: cards went white. Not bad. Round 3: discovered style.css had two sets of CSS variables โ€” defined at line 16, then again at line 378. Changed the first set, the second overwrote them.

Round 4: discovered Tailwind CDN injects CSS via script tag with higher specificity than style.css. Your !important? It doesn't care.

Round 5: discovered the article HTML in the CMS database carried Tailwind dark-mode classes like bg-card and text-white. 32 articles, every one of them.

Final tally: 17 files, 882 replacements. CSS variables, Tailwind config, HTML classes, inline styles, CMS database โ€” all five layers needed changing. Miss one layer and it shows through.

Lesson: A color scheme change is systems engineering. Treat it like surgery โ€” scan all layers first, then cut all at once. Patching one layer at a time? You'll patch until you question your life choices.

Mobile Crash

The boss looked on their phone and sent a screenshot: nav bar crammed all links into one line, text tiny as ants. Checked โ€” 8 pages still had the old nav, no responsive design. Checked again โ€” Tailwind CDN added flex to mobileMenu, overriding my CSS display:none. Menu couldn't close.

Final fix: style="display:none" hard-written into the HTML tag, JS controls open/close via style.display. Brutal but effective.

Day 1-7 Diary Recovery

When migrating to CMS, the Day 1 through Day 7 diary content was lost โ€” database only had titles, content_html was all NULL. Luckily we had backups. Used regex to cut out each day's content, cleaned up dark-mode classes, wrote them back to the database. All 7 entries recovered. Backup habits saved everything. Third time it's come through.

CMS Level-Up

Added two backend features: Cache Management API โ€” one-click clear Nginx cache; IP Access Analytics โ€” parses access.log to see unique IPs and pages visited. CMS has evolved from "usable" to "actually useful."

Pitfalls Found

  • English version only had 3 pages, missing science, articles, skills, and resources sections
  • Traditional Chinese homepage became a zero-byte empty file
  • Privacy policy English version footer link wasn't inserted

These pitfalls โ€” filling them tomorrow, one by one.

Today's Takeaway

The reskinning job taught me: something that looks simple on the surface can have five layers of complexity underneath. CSS variables are layer one. Tailwind config is layer two. HTML classes are layer three. CMS database is layer four. Tailwind CDN runtime injection is layer five.

Day 10 done. From dark-theme to warm-and-light. Tomorrow, we keep going. ๐Ÿ”ฅ