New Blog, New Me?
Okay just kidding, it’s not really a new me.
This is my first post on this new site, which I put together using Github Pages, a Jekyll template called Minimal Mistakes, and a whole lot of patience. Honestly it’s kinda here as a test post, but I figured I’d write a bit about the rationale behind this whole thing.
So why a new site now?
I’ve been thinking about how I wanted a place to post long-form thoughts about subjects (probably mostly about media, art, and video games) for a while now. First I was exploring Neocities as a possibility, but frankly I found it to be a little too janky to be sustainable as a website I actually use for any period of time. It’s fun for making a little hobby site, but the idea of fighting the raw HTML to put my professional work on there in a way that could be easily displayed was…way too much effort.
I was also thinking of figuring out how to entirely self-host this site myself…but that is until I learned Github Pages is free, and that self-hosting your own site is not only unreliable but also potentially leaves your network open to attacks and the like. I figured I can start here and work out self-hosting later if I really want to.
We’ve also been going through some financial issues lately and been needing to tighten our belts, and I realized I was paying $450 a year for Squarespace, which is WILD. I was paying it annually so it kept slipping under my radar as being a huge expense, and every time I would get charged for it I would go “I need to figure out how to move away from this” and then inevitably get so busy that I would straight-up forget to do it. Then the next year would come around and I’d get hit with a huge bill again.
$450 CDN a month was as much as my gym membership costs, and I actually use that! What’s more is that I only ever updated my Squarespace when I started on a new job or project for my portfolio (which, frankly, is very rare these days given the state of the games industry and how infrequently work comes across my table). So it was really not worth $450 a year for a site that just sits around all day and I had to move on.
I wasn’t sure about Github and rolling my own solutions with Jekyll initially because I wanted a lot from this site; I wanted a Portfolio space, a space to blog, a space to think, a space to host images, a space to mess around webdev with. Conventional wisdom dictated I should use a Wordpress, but I also didn’t want it to just feel like a boring wordpress blog or anything; I want to MESS with it a little, you know?
But on a whim after exploring my options and deciding to finally throw together a repo for it, I realized it actually wasn’t too hard to do myself with Minimal Mistakes, and as I type this I have rebuilt my entire Squarespace site (and more!) in just 8 hours. Not bad, I’d say it was worth $40 a month. 😏
So what will you find here?
As I mentioned, probably long-form thoughts about media, art, and video games! Some days I feel like I just need to journal or word vomit things out, and social media sites leave so little room for things like nuance or really in-depth explorations of stuff. Who am I kidding, I’ll probably still be posting, but I do really enjoy longform writing and I want a place I can put that stuff out to the world reliably again (even if no one pays attention to it).
I also want to talk more about things like my thoughts on art (in my own illustration and otherwise), as well as have a place to post my work and direct employers towards. For a long time I’ve kept different parts of myself divided in different corners of the internet, and I’d like to carve a space where I can bring them all together again (for better or for worse).
Anyway, I’ve never really created my own site before and all this was quite a learning process. I’ve dabbled in HTML and CSS but there’s a lot of things I still don’t know or don’t fully understand, but even just putting this together has taught me so much. I’ve already learned (alongside my various other tech projects) that I hate any process that makes me open a terminal or command line things via Git, so in the very least doing webdev doesn’t feel like it’s the job for me. 🥲
But, alas, on that note, I should really stop working on this for now. I told myself today would be my day off this week, and here I am doing a ton of work anyway- go figure.