Happy Halloween, Owlstowners!
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. Every year, my family coordinates costumes around a theme. Part of the fun is putting together our costumes, which usually involves figuring out how to make something.
It is timely then that three of the updates in this newsletter are related to themes (your website’s “costume”): Dark Mode, a new theme (Khakis), and visual previews. I had to figure out a bunch of things to build these features, like CSS custom properties, the CSS function light-dark(), and running background jobs to take screenshots.
Enjoy the new features! Don’t miss the other updates as well.
Cheers,
Ian 🦉
Dark Mode
Just in time for Halloween, Owlstown is embracing the shadows with full dark mode support across all themes! As always, it’s built with accessibility in mind, so themes automatically calculate optimal contrast for your text and links on both light and dark backgrounds.
Dark mode is available to Premium subscribers. It’s also availabe to Pro subscribers who subscribed in 2023 and after.
To enable Dark Mode, go to Theme > Customize and select which option you want.
New Theme: Khakis
Khakis is a nice simple theme to present your research in a clean and navigable layout. I started this theme to learn how to use CSS custom properties and how to use CSS light-dark to implement dark mode. I took what I learned from building this theme and applied it to the rest of the themes.
Visual Previews in Academic Gallery
If your website is featured in the Academic Gallery, it is now shown with a screenshot of your website. This makes it easier to browse the gallery and preview the sites. Whether you're looking for layout ideas or exploring research across disciplines, discovering academic websites on Owlstown is now more visually engaging.
Enter Your Website
The deadline to submit entries to the Best Personal Academic Website Contest 2026 is October 31, 2026. If you need inspiration for your website, you can see examples of some great academic websites made in Owlstown in past contests: 2025, 2023, and 2022.
Owlstown Profiles is Live
The transition from Academic Link to Owlstown Profiles is complete. Your old Academic Link URL automatically redirects to the new URL. For example, academic.link/einstein redirects to einstein.owlstown.net/profile.
Miscellaneous
🚀 Speed Up: Have you noticed your website loading faster? I just added HTTP conditional GET caching to Owlstown websites using ETags and Last-Modified headers in Rails. This means that browsers can quickly validate unchanged pages, so they load cached versions during repeat visits, which reduces database queries and HTML rendering.
🔐 Easy SSL for Custom Domains: I updated my hosting server, so it automatically generates security certificates for custom domains associated with Owlstown sites. This makes it easier and faster to set up custom domains in Owlstown.
📝 Javascript to Typescript: I switched all JavaScript code to TypeScript, so I can catch bugs earlier. I hope this makes your experience with the Owlstown Editor smoother and error-free. I’m sure some bugs will still get through, so If you encounter any bugs (or have suggestions), don’t hesitate to email me at hello@owlstown.com or message @owlstown.com on Bluesky.