New website
I re-did my homepage.
The brief
- the main audience is me
- highly tinkerable
- browsing not scrolling
- a sense of place is more important than a sense time (but every page should have a time stamp)
- backup "content" I provide for 3rd party websites
- flexible about types of thing
- follow the design ethos
- consistency is important only insofar as it means I dont get stuck making decisions
A history of my personal presence on the web
I had my first personal webpage back in my 1st year of university (1996) on the Bristol University computer science webserver. Initially I didn't do much with it beyond what was required for my course work. In 1998 I added a bunch of information about the Sega Saturn game Panzer Dragoon Saga. All this stuff is lost to history [1].
Next, from about 2001 to 2010, I shared the sunnyblue.net domain name with my friend Tom. That link now redirects to the Veg box scheme he runs. Under that domain I had a weblog, or rather a series of weblogs first using blosxom, then wordpress and finally tumblr. Tumblr was good for posting quickly and having conversations but I missed the tinkering that blosxom allowed.
Next I finally bought my own domain toffeemilkshake.co.uk and hosted a variety of websites on here including a jekyll powered weblog.
Now here we are
I wanted to get back to a more tinkerable website inspired by the metafore of a digital garden, and I like the idea of puttong somehting together for browsing rather than scrolling. Also I want to start pulling in and saving stuff from sites like Letterboxd and Board Game Geek. I've replaced my Goodreads usage with a site of my own devising which I'm considering bringing into this main homepage properly. Ditto the pancake site. Most of my recent websites have been built in a similar fashion [2] so combining them under a single codebase makes a kind of sense.
Notes
- I would later sell my copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga to Computer Exchange in Camden for £80 (at the time I felt this was a good idea but as I write this I see that people are selling it on eBay for £500+, though TBH I'm a little sceptical about the reality of a lot of these ebay prices)
- That fashion: Sveltekit hosted on cloudflare. This is a sweetspot for me as I can easily fall back to plain HTML,CSS,&JS but also it makes resuing bits and adding interaction a snap.