I have been maintaining this website for over ten years now. I love having my little space on the web to do whatever I want with it. For most of that time I was stuck on making it “professional” (read: acceptable to bosses). I have used colors I liked at the time and mostly very basic rectangles and images. This has even been true in the years since becoming a web developer.
Over the past year or so, I have found a lot of joy in the Indieweb, and its various principles that make the web better. The biggest for me being: Own your data. Ruby and I went on a whole data-cleansing trip this past winter. Though there’s certainly still more to do with that. One step in owning my data is putting my stuff on my site first; that this site is the source of truth.
I also wanted some of the cool Indieweb tools like webmentions, automated POSSE (Post (on your) Own Site; Syndicate Elsewhere), and microformats. Initially I started to roll my own server and lost steam realizing I spend most of my days maintaining websites and I just wanted a place to post. Self-hosting is a skill I’m currently learning, but will take me some time before I get there.
To get a pretty out-of-the-box solution, I chose to go with WordPress.org on some shared hosting. For a place to just post, this meets my needs, and there are some good plugins for the Indieweb features I wanted. I spent a lot of time over the past few weeks setting up Ruby’s and my new sites, and did a lot of learning (read: bashing my head against documentation) and the biggest lesson I learned is: WordPress is fiddly.
I am used to controlling and writing every line of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (give or take a template or framework), so this was a challenge. Once I understood the order of what gets loaded when it got much easier. Mostly, both sites were CSS efforts. I do like styling in just CSS whenever I can, and I set out to have some fun with this one. Inspired by sites like ribo.zone and maya.land, I wanted to make some very weird, very me things.
I decided to lean into some of the things I have enjoyed in my life: maps, books, movies, and themed the pages based on those. I am most proud of how the About and Blog pages came out! I will definitely be revisiting a lot of the designs, especially in the showcase pages, and I need to really rework some mobile views.
I am also particularly proud of the little animated GIFs on the home page. They were very fun to animate! I would love to revisit those because I want the movement to be more intentional, but for now it feels a little magical and a little throwback-y to early web aesthetics.
I have been stepping away from some online platforms recently, mostly because I don’t like going to them anymore. So many have stopped being places to see my friends, and just become riddled with ads and slop. I do keep up with news and online happenings through RSS and newsletters mostly. That has been a huge improvement for my web experience.
I love the cool places on the web and hope that my site is becoming one of them.