This site gets rewritten for the 4th time!

Written: 2023-04-04 · Last Updated: 2023-04-05

Yeah. This is the fourth time I've done this. To be fair, the first edition of my site was in 2017 and was based off of my first ever "Hello, world!" page in HTML; obviously, it was bad. (See inset image)

Rewrites 2 and 3 used GitHub Pages' Jekyll static site generator. They actually weren't that bad, web-design speaking, but I've rewritten the site again using my own code because I think it's just better. No frameworks, therefore no bloat, right? (I do apologise as this idea sounds pretty weak given that my CSS code I've just finished writing now for this page is uh…not the greatest. (I just discovered the calc() function in CSS))

The thing that actually triggered me to do this rewrite was beause I wanted one of those Carrd sites with the socials links and stuff, as I had just finished making my pronouns.page. But, I didn't like the certainty that a Carrd site 1. wouldn't be as customisable as hardcoded HTML/CSS, and 2. would probably have tons of JS and HTML bloat. I then looked at my own site, which used Jekyll and so was a victim of the exact same issue… (Maybe to a lesser extent but my point still stands)

And so, here we are. Version 4 of the site. I just started from the ground up. It's still based on the GitHub Pages Jekyll theme called "Dinky," but it's a bit more interesting, and it's my own code as well – which I like better because I know that it's minimal, for better or for worse. :P

I should also mention the index page of this site. I'm quite proud of it, despite it's current issues on iOS (to do with background image scaling). I think it's to do with the @media queries in the CSS, but I don't know for sure, and to be honest I really don't care. iOS users can suffer a bit lmao. Serves them right for using Safari, I think. #lol

I should also thank Brad Taunt's article on CSS that emulates the old macOS Aqua UI buttons for being the basis for most of the button div code I used in that page's styles.

So where do we go from here?

After publishing this, I'm thinking of importing my old "blog" posts and stuff from previous site designs, just so the current thing I've got set up doesn't feel void of content – and also because I believe strongly in the archival of all internet content. (Currently there are a few Wayback snapshots of my old articles but they're pretty inaccessible for most)

I like blogging. Usually I tweet, but Twitter is a short-form blogging service, and short-form content social medias kinda suck. I never really got into Tumblr blogging either, as I started using Tumblr past its hayday of blogging; Tumblr has a really different culture nowadays and blogging just doesn't fit right on there imo. Having my own blog on my own site is nice. I'd be lucky to get one person to actually read 50% of a single article, but that's fine. It's nice to scream into the void sometimes.