My site posts looked like a visual mess. Here’s how I fixed it.
I tried to pick good hero images for my posts. I really did. Ones in the public domain, ones that matched the content, ones that were high quality. There are actually a lot of great sources for that. But when I looked at my blog, it was a visual mess. The images were all different styles with different palettes and different levels of detail. Since I use the images in the list of posts on my website homepage, the differences were even more glaring.
This weekend I decided to fix it. I learned how to generate hero images with stable diffusion that had a consistent style. I also replaced my banner image to match the new style. The ideas was to give the site a more cohesive look. To get an idea of what it looked like before, just check the second page of posts on my site. I only updated a handful of post hero images to get the front page looking better. I’m not sure it’s worth it to update the whole backlog.
First, I found a stable diffusion site that I liked, was easy to use, and best of all, was free. But prompting stable diffusion to get what you want can be tricky. Here’s a good guide. I looked at a lot of examples to find a style I liked then used a local model to generate prompts that would get me similar results. That’s right, I used a local ollama model just for generating an initial stable diffusion prompt. It was “style” and “artistic reference” that seemed to dial things in the most for me.
Even with the extra help, I still had to experiment to get the right style. Finally, I adjusted that prompt for each post to get the right image.
I hope you’ll agree that the new look is an improvement.