I know a personal website or blog is never truly finished but right now I’m doing a new layout, figuring out 11ty and Nunjucks, and I feel my whole body vibrate when I think about how it’ll look when I get the home page set! I have all these things I want to do with it (shrines, webrings, art gallery, microblog, etc) but I can’t do them until I actually have a space to do it!
I guess my real question is: Does anyone else get so amped about content (of any type) that they just wanna get the underlying work over with?
Dunno, my sites are largely static, so it’s the other way around: I can get a homepage up very quickly, with decent looks and a bunch of text + pictures. But after that I can be like, what now? What else is there to do? My Codeberg site has been somewhat dormant lately because of that. Still managed to add a bunch of stuff on top of the original concept first, and there’s nothing wrong with taking a break.
Ur codeberg link isn’t working for me so I can’t see any of your work but I getchu! I feel like if I didn’t have any content to add I would be obsessed with making new layouts/themes!
That’s odd, I just checked the link. It works on my side. Anyway, I use my own SSGs too, for parts of other websites, but those have quick-start templates built in. So even for those sections I can just get something up and running and worry about making it fancy later.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to adding more material to starbreaker.org, but I’m not quite satisfied with the markup my tools are generating. The tools themselves are pretty much solid, though. You can see for yourself at ~starbreaker/starbreaker - my personal website (yet again) - sourcehut git if you look at arachne.mk, arachne.config.mk, and the contents of scripts/.
Yeah, totally. In fact, I’m the kind of person that disregards aesthetics until I have something functional and then add the nice visual details later as they occur to me. I quite literally slam out the most basic container for the content I wanna make and then come back in with a sharpie and glitter glue when it suits me. I do this mostly because if I don’t my mind will start getting hung up on making it perfect, but also because I’ll lose the excitement that made me want to do it in the first place. Once it’s Out There, I feel much more comfortable and motivated to improve on it.
I love building systems so I have the opposite problem a lot of the time—I want to get my art done or the writing done so I can test the cool new thing I slapped together! Enough to the point that when I first built my website, I created the underlying scripts with dummy data instead of my actual art/writing/characters. But I can definitely relate to being overly excited about certain parts of the process. It’s so awesome when everything comes together.
I jump from project to project and often get 80% of the work done in a sprint and admittedly seldom return to do the other 20%.
The exception is my main site now, as I’ve been adding functionality to my personal blog brennan.day and tinkering with it nearly every day for the past seven months, doing that alongside my writing. I’ve been making websites for over a decade, and this is the first one that feels largely “finished” and I feel as though I’ll be content with it indefinitely.