Posted 2025-02-15

hey. again.

Happy late Valentine’s Day, if you celebrate. Usually I never mention it cuz it isn’t a holiday I bother to think about. (outside of the cheap ass chocolate lol.)
But the spirit of companionship is a nice one and celebrating the ones you have close to you is undeniably worth doing.

Like the way me and procrastination have been together for the last 13 years or so.

For as long as I’ve been burdened with responsibilities, the one thing I’ve always been able to predict and anticipate is doing everything as late as possible, as fast as possible, while very actively trying to repress the thoughts of any potential consequences.

 

Except for uh. Well. This.

This website rewrite took me about 3 months or so. In that time I’ve gotten a new drawing tablet, opened commissions, nearly beat every challenge deck in Balatro, picked up another character in Street Fighter and (most importantly) gotten laid off.

That’s a far cry from the kid who nearly failed English class despite being fluent in it just because they didn’t wanna turn in the homework. Go me, motherfucker.

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learn how to code stupid, stupid.

So with the preamble out of the way, let’s all ask the age old question — what prompted this change?

And the answer, just like last time, is the old site sucked shit.

What’s the deal there? If you read the old blogpost I’ve reluctantly archived from when the first rewrite was brought upon this domain, there’s a real sense of pride in the text that can only come from the highest point of the Dunning-Kruger line. I was real proud of what I had managed to accomplish at that point, cuz it looked pretty nice all things considered.

Of course, the tiny little detail I had missed out on was the fact that the backend was a hodgepodge of shotgun-trial-and-error measuring, position: absolute; and a complete lack of understanding what Astro is capable of. And I guess the typography was all over the place too.

That reared it’s head really damn fast when I started having ideas for more features for the site. I suddenly did not find myself wanting to even touch the codebase!

So despite the fact that the website looks nice, I decided to hell with it and went for a full-on rewrite, this time with some rules in mind;

• One unified layout for the entire site as a whole.
• Make page creation as easy as possible.
• Don’t put literally all the styling in a single CSS file.

Yes I really did do that last one. It’s as bad as you can imagine.
The rules were mostly inspired by the website of coding whiz (and good friend) NotNite, whose simple website with a single layout made it a no-brainer to go for something just as easy for the mind… just a bit fancier.

With all that in mind, and several months of brainstorming later, we are now here. So let’s run through the changes.

friday night at the bar.

The sidebar is the centerpiece of the entire site — no pun intended. Everything from site pages to external links are accessible just by clicking the left side of the screen. (Or Esc if you have Javascript enabled.)

That alone makes the website look cleaner. I didn’t want to go for a generic hamburger menu, so I made something that I feel is unique enough while still retaining the usefulness of them.

As of publishing, the sidebar is kind of a rush job. The buttons are kind of barebones and at higher DPI they end up becoming kind of small. That’s something for future pillow to take care of though.

_{You have no idea how much I’ve just been opening and closing this thing. It’s mesmerizing.}

why can’t you just do everything?

The coolest thing about Astro when I first started using it was when NotNite introduced me to using Markdown files as page content. That alone made me want to start using Astro over whatever it was I had before, and once it was set up it was the coolest thing ever.

That was until I had to add things other than body text to the page. Astro has a lot of other things that you can put in your files like components and code, and Markdown on its own has neither. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have Markdown just be Markdown but with everything else also, like JavaScript and slotting in Astro components and— oh it just exists great.

MDX is really good. Almost everything you see on the website that has words in it is an MDX file. This is an MDX file. The index.html? That’s an index.mdx. It makes everything so stupidly neat it’s kind of crazy. Being able to create components to be directly used in body text is a game changer unlike any other, and makes creating features genuinely fun.

The picture higher up on this post also is an individual component. That ability alone to be able to just chuck any image in without hassle is something that not even fucking Word can do reliably. Damn man.

he’s the serif and we’re out here.

Fonts. You like fonts. I like fonts. So I put three of them into this website. Three whole fonts. Wow!

Once again inspired by NotNite’s website, she had a great little theme switching dropdown that lets the user just change fonts on the fly. Of course, she had made it herself. Another big shout out to her for also helping me get it set up during the early stages of this websites rewrite, and for just making it in general.

If you want to try out the font switching, just go into the sidebar and it should be on the top. Pick whichever one you want; as long as you have JavaScript enabled, it should remember which one you use.

more to come, hopefully.

That kinda covers most of the stuff that actually matters, outside of things just looking better.
If I’ve missed anything here, then you can check out the credits page!

If you are interested in the code of the site, then you’ll be glad to find it’s fully open-source, and you can check it out any time.

Now if you excuse me, I gotta go back to job searching.

 

Oh yeah, my commissions are open.