Keeping the website up and running is no effort, but keeping it fresh and filled has been a challenge to put it mildly! Recent life events and societal phenomena but are best typified by the term upheaval. Moving house through the health-scare and dealing with the influx of news has been chaotic and laid claim to most of my attention. Though lately I have found renewed energy and drive to clean house and make time for my own endeavors.
On the website end this means I have done lots of small tweaks and technically changed a lot of layout practices, something that is an ongoing effort. Visually I updated the logo and revised my background animation-script. I also rewrote the frontpage text to be less politically colored as I hope to do more media-creation and a broad manifest style statement on the frontpage could put readers and viewers off..
On the home front I have been gaining energy from taking things step-by-step, taking more joy and energy from actively getting small things done. Not just being goal oriented, but rather during the activities that seem mundane and menial. This helps actually doing them and taking pleasure from things even before seeing noticeable results.
Borrowed and colorized this Zen-themed photo from ‘theportugalnews‘
Being a an (ex-professional) web developer I want to stay on top of newer developments and compliance, for instance working on decent social media integration and presence. To this end I upgraded some structures, upgraded some code, so now previews on social media will display imagery from content and not the site logo.
I expanded on my earlier custom background animation script adding functionality for per-page customization (and ‘intelligent’ defaulting) of hashtag displayed in the upper left corned of all pages. Also I added another idea in the code; fluctuating gradient colors! This helps the pages look less static, though the shifting is very subtle as to not take away too much attention from content.
I do hope to get some feedback one of these days on the background, bc I have no real idea on how (or if) the visitors experience is influenced. Most of the reactions I get directly on-site seem to be from spam-bots that are all to willing to fill out the ‘website’ field in the forms below my pages. I will be changing the accompanying text to dissuade (real) visitors from filling that field, bc I don’t have time to check and verify sites in reactions, so I usually just ignore them. Fearing most are automated, malicious and purely commercial attempts to flatter me in the hopes I’ll repost their comment (and all too obvious; their links!).
I also silently added a new page to track, test and demonstrate the sites markup (linked below). It’s nothing to brag about, but a nice aid and reference (mainly to myself).
Zen