I’ve been thinking about moving all my videos from Youtube to this site for a long time, and finally - it’s done! From now on, you can find all of them in the videos section in the nav-bar. It’s still a work in progress, and I have a few problems to solve, but honestly, it already looks exactly how I imagined. Can’t believe I pulled it off in just one day!

And no, the reason isn’t even my usual outrage at Youtube’s algorithmic feed, engineered purely to hook you and make as much money as possible. What actually triggered me yesterday was something simpler: yet another completely nonsensical UI change. These updates are getting worse every year. Why?? Why do they keep making it worse with every new version? The only explanation I can think of is that they need to justify paying the UI/UX department. But either way, it sucks - so why not just leave?

I figured I could use that frustration as fuel and finally move everything here. I’d been postponing it, thinking it would take a lot longer, but it only took one day. I know that’s a pretty basic task for many people, but since I don’t come from a tech background, it was a bit more of a challenge for me. I’m really happy with how well the new section blends in style-wise with the rest of the site.

It must look smth like this (if it looks wrong, that's probably because of cached CSS):

That said, there’s one problem I haven’t solved yet: I have long descriptions for a bunch of videos, and I don’t know where to put them. I don’t want to clutter the main page with text under every thumbnail, and I also don’t want to create a separate page for each video. I love the simplicity of clicking a thumbnail and having the video open in the native player - it really fits the site’s philosophy and design. I tried adding tooltips and expanding the video with JS below its row, but neither option worked well, so I’m leaving that for later. If you have any suggestions about how to include descriptions - or where they could go - please email me! I’d love to hear some feedback.

Another issue is file size. As I mentioned in the last site update, I’ve been trying to keep the site as lightweight as possible. But adding a bunch of long videos doesn’t exactly help with that. I converted everything to 1080p and compressed a lot, but the total size is still around 800 MB. I know that’s not terrible, but I’d love to reduce it further - I just don’t know how yet.

For now, all the videos are just VCV Rack jams. By the way, I uploaded a few that weren’t on my Youtube channel before - check them out! Especially dream is destiny - it’s my first and favorite jam. I’m also thinking it would be fun to upload stuff that’s not music-related. I feel a lot less restricted here - emotionally and legally. I can use whatever music or media I want without worrying about it getting blocked in some country. And of course, it’s much easier to shitpost here, since it’s basically just my personal braindump. Sure, there’s no discoverability, but I was never focused on views or subscribers. I’m genuinely happy to have a few people who know this site and check in from time to time.

I’ll keep playing around with the layout and different ideas to find the best solution - so once again, I’d be glad to hear any feedback or ideas!

Update right away:

While writing this post, I tried a few more ways to add descriptions and temporarily settled on the plain HTML <summary>–<details> element. It’s kinda lame, but it’ll work for now. The setup is crazy stupid: I have a data.toml file where all the video data is stored, and I added the description right there. There's a big con - I need to convert it to HTML so it displays properly with all the links and paragraphs. I like how it looks, but there’s definitely a cleaner and more adequate method to do exactly the same thing.