Who Invited This Guy?

I've tried to write and rewrite this blog post at least three times by now. Every time it ended up going off topic or becoming way too personal for my comfort. I have a few other blog drafts I'm working on, mostly about tech stuff. I could've just finished and posted one of those, but I guess I felt weird just jumping in without introducing myself or my site a little bit first.

So, who the hell invited this guy?

Hi, I'm that guy! You can call me Saint!

I started this site back in April, but I've been in general indieweb spaces for about a year and a half. Depending on what you count as "indieweb" you might say I've been here for several years, actually. But it was only about a couple years ago that I started taking it seriously and actually knew what I was doing. Before 2022, I couldn't tell you what the hell a "flexbox" or a "webring" was.

I'd consider myself to be more on the creative side than the techie side, to be honest. Most of my old sites where used to show off art, OCs, and other artsy-type projects. Even my technical knowledge leans more towards making things look nice with CSS than understanding complicated scripting languages. I'd like to think I know more about basic web development than the average person on the street, but definitely less than a professional full stack webdev. I mostly keep myself in hobbyist spaces for a reason.

So, if this site's been around since April, why did I wait till November to make my first blog post? Lame answer, but I've been pretty busy with offline stuff. Just know that this last year has been very hectic for me in multiple ways, and I don't always have the time or energy to work on my site. I'm hoping that should change soon, but I can't make any promises.

Another small part of it was that I wanted to use a big fancy blog framework with a tag cloud and comment section and all that fun stuff! I couldn't find an existing framework that I liked, so I over-confidently attempted to code it all myself using my extremely limited PHP knowledge. I eventually realized this was all pointless if I didn't actually have any blog posts that were worth reading, though. Generally, I think it's better to focus on the actual content of my website, than the extra stuff surrounding it. You can have a site with the coolest looking layout and the most robust back-end and whatever other features you think may matter, but no ones going to actually visit it if the core content is shallow or non-existent. Maybe one day I'll go back to that project, but for now I don't think people will have a very hard time sifting through all one of my blog posts.

Site Changes

On the off-chance anyone is actually regularly visiting my site, you may have noticed some changes. I've redone basically everything, most notably I've updated the homepage and changed the CSS to Lissom.CSS.

As much as I love hand-coding all my stuff, it can take a lot of time and effort to test. I was so lazy with my old CSS and it showed. Every time I added a new type of element that wasn't already defined in the stylesheet, I had to add it, which was a hassle. All because I was just too lazy to define all the basic HTML elements the first time around. Half of the CSS rules where set inline for some reason, I think my past self thought it saved storage/loading time, somehow? Anyway, Lissom comes with everything I need right out of the box, I just made a couple small adjustments to make it fit the needs of my site better. Hopefully, everything should be functional, responsive, and accessible. Eventually I'd like to go back and redo my layout from scratch to give it a more personalized feel, but this will do for now.

I also switched everything back from PHP to static HTML. I just figured with how few pages I have so far, it's really not that tedious just copying and pasting the header and footer to most of the pages, and not worth making your computer fetch extra files. I'm not one of those people who's super minimalist about scripts and thinks any use of them whatsoever is "bloat", but I do try to only use them when I think they're completely necessary. I'm also looking into various static site generators, so hopefully that'll make things easier for both of us down the line.

I've also added an RSS feed to my site! This blog post is the only thing there now, but I'll be updating it as time goes on.

Future Plans

I have a whole separate page dedicated to stuff I'm working on. My highest priorities are my zonelets-related projects and redoing my link directory. The latter has grown especially big and I might have to separate it into multiple pages or something if I actually want it to be readable.

I'm still brainstorming what exactly I want this website to be. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.