tags: update, website
Preamble
Last week's guitar post came about when I rediscovered my website in a rare bout of free time. Since then I've had plenty of time to muse over why I always wanted a website but could never make one 'work'.
Knowing if something has worked or not also requires me to define what that means. What do I want to achieve with a website? To me that has almost always been clear: to collect the content related to my various hobbies into one central place:
- So people who own a Katana60 keyboard can find details on the firmware or layouts on my website.
- And people who are interested in the various songs and albums I've produced can find a list here (similar to a portfolio).
- I'd also like to highlight my presence on various community forums - to highlight my most popular contributions, that might have more general appeal (or otherwise).
So why has that never worked? Why have I never been able to sustain a blog for more than a few months at a time? The initial answer pops instantly in my head: "I never have enough time", but to quantify that is a little more time consuming.
Without diving in to the history of my life and looking for some source of blame, I can simply say that having two kids takes a lot of your time, and what free time parents-of-two have is spent recouperating from exhaustion and planning for your children.
I'm trying to think in a solution oriented manner though. The last time I tried to get a blog off the ground I decided to use github pages to host it, because working with a very simple publishing method was the most important thing. I cannot be bogged down with the complexities of user interfaces, account management. To draft a new article is as simple as creating a new file and writing. Publishing it is as simple as commiting changes and pushing to git in the command line.
This simplicity is vital because it means I can focus the pockets of free time on writing, which in turn should result in omore (blogging) productivity, as evidenced by a rather unplanned stream of consciousness that resulted in (this post last week).
New website
Despite the challenges of parenting two children, my life is more settled than it has probably ever been (I'll no doubt run that thought through my mind in the coming days too). Which is partly why I feel that now is the right time to start writing things down.
This site was a result of following some tutorials on static site generators, but I would also like to improve the styling and usability, so I decided to work on a new theme to replace the default 'minima' theme. I've long been interested in the Tailwind CSS framework and it seems like a great way to get to learn it would be to use it for my own site.
So I started writing a new theme, based on this tutorial here - writing a theme will take more time than writing my thoughts in a blog post, so I expect it'll take weeks, maybe months before the theme is live. The great thing about Jekyll though is that migrating the ocntent will be super SUPER simple.
Watch this space!