On the last week, I was thinking about adding more pages to the site and maybe importing some of my notes here, but then I realized that, basically, it's the opposite of what I originally wanted to do. A big number of pages requires more attention and regular maintenance, and I've noticed that instead of actually writing stuff, I'm just trying to find a way to make everything look reasonable, endlessly tweaking CSS and templates. It sucks, but this is how my brain works. Maybe it is some kind of escapism, but I really enjoy tinkering with stuff without any purpose, and it always turns into a deep rabbit hole and a few wasted weeks of going back and forth.
But as I've written in the previous post, things always align together when it's needed. A few days ago, I stumbled upon this article by Steph Ango, which really resonated with me because of my frustration after attempts to make my website minimalistic and full of different stuff at the same time. He writes:
When it comes to ideas, I agree — allow your mind to be changed. When it comes to process, I disagree. Style emerges from consistency, and having a style opens your imagination. Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable... Having a style collapses hundreds of future decisions into one and gives you focus... Style gives you leverage. Every time you reuse your style, you save time. A durable style is a great investment.
My main goal here is not to make the best-looking website or become the master of CSS, but rather to sort out my thoughts and learn to write things down to better understand myself. And if I want to make it work, I need to stop spending so much time on things that don't matter so much, even if I enjoy doing them. Besides that, I really need to practice English, because my current level is horrible, and I usually spend a few hours on a simple blog post because of attempts to find better words.
After these thoughts, I've decided not to add any knowledge-based notes here and, moreover, remove some stuff that takes time and doesn't have any purpose. In the past few days, I've simplified the structure a lot: now there are only two main pages in the navigation bar - homepage and weblog. I've moved all static page links to the homepage (including web places, bookmarks, and stuff that is more or less consistent), so now I can focus more on the weblog. Also, I've removed the changelog completely, and all site updates are going to be here too from now on (I hope that there will be fewer of them). The tag system turned out to be very useful because I can have different types of posts here and filter them easily. I really want to spend more time doing real things and writing about them in the weblog, so I hope this decision will change the situation for the better.
Also, while surfing dozens of blogrolls, I've stumbled upon a few personal sites with amazing minimalistic design focused on writing that inspired me a lot. Check them out:
- mgx - amazing minimalistic design & pinned posts, I've never seen this before, great idea
- mei's diary - accent on diary entries, zero unnecessary sections
- bacardi55 - great design! I took the idea to move all static pages to my homepage here
- veronique - perfect style, beautiful art
- Noisy Deadlines - great tags and category system
- Jedda - cool example of a blog with a photo journal, really like it
Here's a list of all recent updates since I've removed the changelog:
- Renamed all page URLs (lowercase + hyphen as separator)
- Added a bunch of new bookmarks
- Added a bunch of new web places
- Added a favicon
- Simplified CSS and merged everything into one file
- Cleared code a little bit. Checked the site with W3C HTML Validator, and it was a total mess
- Added manual theme toggle
- Added emojis to blog post titles for better visual representation
I think there are going to be a few more minor updates this month. I want to add "next" and "previous" links to the blog template to improve navigation and maybe play with colors. For now, I made everything grayscale - I like the look, but readability is definitely much worse now.