Blog's Up, I Guess

It's been, like, what, over a year and a half since I last touched my own website? That's kind of sad.

Truth be told, I have a horrible memory and get distracted really easily, so there were weeks where I kinda forgot I HAD a website of my own. Back in July, I was planning on overhauling the entire website, giving it a new look, and adding in stuff like a blog, a gallery for my drawings, and an AMA system of some kind? I was getting ambitious. Too ambitious, apparently, since I dropped it in August or September or something.

So, why the update now? Well, the whole purpose of this site was to escape from the walled gardens of various social media sites, and considering Twitter seems to be imploding under Mr. Musk's watch, I figured it was a good time to actually start working on it again. I can't be the only one weirded out by the fact daily tweet limits are apparently implemented to some degree. That aside, I also burned myself out a little on drawing and wanted to give myself a bit of a break by working on something else in the meantime.

You may have noticed that things look a little barren compared to before. In case I end up changing the website's look later, here's what the site looked like at the time of this writing:

I've taken to using Pelican, a Python-based website generator, for generating parts of this website. Currently using the Flex theme (slightly modified to allow for Remark42 comments on blog entries). I know a few webmasters, especially those in neo-webring circles, look down on such tools, and it does admittedly limit self-expression for websites, partly defeating the purpose of going against the homogenous looking internet of the late 2010s and 2020s. That said, I don't intend to use this tool for the entire site, either, I just wanted something I could use for just getting my thoughts down on my own site without having to retype out HTML for every single blog update or topic.

As for my future plans for this site; I want to have everything separated into different "sections" that serve a different purpose. This part of the site is just my blog, filled with my ramblings, media log, and other miscellaneous thoughts. I'll have a gallery of my drawings in some other part of the site, maybe a few demos in another, throw in some webcore for good measure, I don't know. Each part of the site is going to have it's own look, and I'm not going to even try making it all look consistent. Think of them as like different rooms in a building, each decorated differently and each there for different reasons.

Going forward, I'm going to treat updating this site as more of a continuous process as opposed to a one-and-done "update then forget about it for a year" sort of affair. Updates are going to be more liberally applied. No more saving overhauls on my hard drive for several months then abandoing everything after I lose interest. Shaping this site into something I want is going to be messy. Things are probably going to break. I just need to make peace with that fact and get to making this site what I want it to be, whatever that is, one step at a time. It's not going to happen overnight, or in a matter of a few weeks. I need to keep at this. Hope you all are as interested to see where this goes as I am.