Site Updates 2024 11

It’s that time of year again; no, I’m not talking about the festive season, but the roughly biennial moment when I realise that I have once again abandoned this blog for months on end, and decide to remake the whole thing from scratch.

A few years back, 2020 to be precise, I moved from Wordpress to a Firebase-hosted Hugo-coded site. It took me a while, but I figured out how to get a basic site up and running. Two years (and I think only two posts 💀) later I got another urge for updates, and spent a fair bit of time smashing my face against code I didn’t really understand to make a gallery, of sorts, for displaying my makes.

All that was working, and I managed to put a few posts and a bit of the back-catalogue up, but I still wasn’t happy. The site did not spark joy. It was simple, minimalist, verging on elegant. And that’s just… not where I am in my life right now. Right now, I’m seeking out bright colours and patterns and sparkles and things that make me laugh out loud, because I really took the message in Joyful to heart.

So I went back to the Hugo themes to see if there was anything more appropriate. One - Story - looked really good, but was only a single-page theme and I wouldn’t even know where to start turning it into something suitable for a multi-page site. I’ll remind you, dear reader, that I am not a programmer. Setting up the site following some kind soul’s step-by-step tutorial? Doable. Dual-screening Stack Overflow and w3schools to tweak some CSS? Manageable. Overhauling a theme? Not a chance.

Unfortunately it turned out that I have very specific aesthetic requirements, and that one-page template was the only one that got close. So I sighed deeply, poured myself a motivational glass of wine, made several backups, and got to hacking.

* * *

As I work in experience design I also did a little purpose/vision exercise. I asked myself; what do I actually want this site for? Who do I want to look at it? What do I want them to take away from the experience?

This simplified things a lot. I don’t want to sell patterns, or finished objects; my day job is enough for the moment. I don’t want to monetise with ads because I hate ads (let’s just forget that I worked in digital marketing for nearly 10 years 😬). I don’t want to build a community because then I’d have to manage a community, and deal with people. Ew.

Basically, all I want is to show off. I want people to find this and say ‘gosh, isn’t she talented and clever’. Say, a future employer who might see this and think ‘goodness, she knits, analyses data, and builds websites from scratch? What a well-rounded and multi-talented individual who’d be a real asset to my team!’ And then they might look at the contact block at the bottom of the page and use it to offer me a job paying a million pounds per year to be unique and creative but also incredibly smart for them.

👀

* * *

Years ago, my partner at the time picked up a fun new computer game called Dark Souls. We often spent quality time together on the sofa with him playing games, me sitting next to him knitting and helping/heckling. But this game was different. He picked up the controller, launched the game, walked two steps, and died. YOU DIED, said the game, helpfully, and an ominous bell clanged. Thanks, he said, I noticed. He tried again. YOU DIED. Clang. And again. YOU DIED. Clang.

Eventually I had to leave the room, because the combination of ominous clang and his frustration was genuinely upsetting to me. Whenever he launched the game I’d make my excuses and do something more fun, like removing clagged-up hair from the shower drain (we both had long hair, it was a grim few years).

He did beat the game in the end, and even reached a point where he could joke about the mistakes he’d made in the beginning. He claimed that the satisfaction of finally beating a boss that’d dicked on him for eight hours solid made the experience “worth it”. He bought sequels, and merch.

To this day I still cringe when I hear the clang.

* * *

All this is to say, I’m glad the ‘you irretrievably broke this website, here’s where (but not how) you fucked up :)’ screen I see so often on localhost doesn’t come with an ominous clang or I’d be completely mentally broken by now. I’m also glad the sound insulation in my house is pretty good because my neighbours seem nice and they don’t need to know about the vocabulary I use when I’m frustrated, which was 95% of the time I was working on this site.

Some shit’s still broken; somewhat ironically, the main one I can’t work out how to fix is the 404 page. I moved all the pages around on the site and in the background file structure, so I probably missed some redirects/aliases. But if you drop into the homepage and just scroll around, you see the things I want you to see and a contact block, so that will do for now.

Maybe one day I’ll feel that post-Souls-esque glow.