I was looking at this very website recently and, for some strange reason, I felt a lot of feelings and thoughts about it. I don’t exactly know what these feelings and thoughts are so many it’s better to just articulate and put it out here as I try to process this.
I guess I’ll just get what I felt was good about the site out of the way first. The site is simple, has a clean-mobile friendly layout, organized and the pipeline to add posts into my blog is pretty nice.
Okay, now on to the things that are bothering me…and there are a lot of them.
First, the colors. I kind of like the colors individually. I kind of like them on my VIM when I code. But it feels like there’s something wrong with them together. At first, I thought it was the fonts, so I went through many iterations of fonts. No dice. I don’t really know what’s wrong. Is it too many colors? Is it too hard to read? Maybe brown is a bad idea? Maybe I should look around for more colorschemes. Or maybe I should make it should that I can have many different color schemes that users can choose or even up to my mood! That would be cool.
Another thing that really irks me is the lack of ability to fully customize code blocks in hugo. This one tilts me to no end. Do I really have to manually configure the css file? Maybe? The last I checked, I hit a roadblock where it is just how hugo generates code blocks. Is the solution really to write my own SSG? It’s the similar for latex. Latax looks absolutely terrible but it looks incredibly troublesome to customize.
Anyway, I was browsing through trying to dig up old-school websites and ran into some interesting hosts like neocities. Browsing the websites there reminded me how fun learning HTML/JS/CSS was back in the days. A part of me wants that back; to make fun websites that are expressive, caring less about ‘user experience’ and ‘portability’. It kind of got me thinking about the modern take on being ‘user-friendly’ and ‘portable’. Are we being too focused on what we assume people want that we are limiting our own creativity? There are so many websites out there are so cookie-cutter that even having a mind-bloggingly stupid-and-plain ones like Sean Barret’s look cool.
So why not do it?
I feel like I had conflicting ideas about what this website is supposed to be. It started off just being a landing page to my credentials and portfolios. Then, for some reason, I decided to add a blog despite trying to escape blogging many times in my lifespan. Thinking about what to blog about is stupidly difficult considering that there’s a conflict of interest of what I want to say and what I want to present myself as to the public, especially since the site at the moment is tied to my real life. I think that I always thought that people sharing stuff on their social media really cool and I kind of wanted to do it too, but on hindsight, if I really cared about sharing stuff, I would do it on social media, not on some site that no one visits. If anything, the blog is more for myself to spew words to organize my thoughts, record things that would be useful for future me and just to rant.
Like now lol.
And even now for this post, I’m thinking that I shouldn’t post this if the site tied to my real life persona.
Which now begs the question: do I really need this site to show off my credentials? Perhaps I’m just looking for a motivation to have a website about myself. Maybe it’s the narcissist part of me who wants to be able to tell people to ‘go visit my cool website’. I highly doubt any potential employers are looking at this website.
Well, to give myself some credit, it seemed like a good idea at that time. I was kind of looking for employment options and some way to express myself, I guess. Also my circumstances and opinions were a little different compared to now.
But I have been there and done that. I guess I know better now :)
Time for a facelift soon?