New beginnings

It's been a while. I'm aware of that. Almost a year! There has been breaks before, week or months. But this long? Never.

The break started as your usual not-feeling-like-it. I wanted to redesign my site, but either I didn't have the time and motivation or I was out of ideas. Seeing the site reminded me of this, trying to blog reminded me of this. Suddenly it had been a month. Then another, and another, and another. Finally, I felt a bit ashamed to blog again. It had been such a long time already. What would people say? Would anyone even bother to read it anymore?

I dwelled into Instagram, writing these little blog post type entries alongside my photos. They were personal and didn't seem to fit the direction my blog had taken throughout the years. Plus not all of them were quite blog sized. Something between microblogging and blogging. It gave me an excuse to stay away from the site that wasn't doing it for me.

At some point I actually had ideas for the new look and structure for the site, but still no motivation. Or was it even something else? The good old impostor syndrome was there definitely. And my depression, anxieties, the whole pack. I was running on fumes, and taking on the project of rebuilding the site was something I just couldn't do.

On the top of it, I had created myself a problem. Previously, I had been adding redesigns on top of each other. My stylesheet was a mess of old and new and something commented out. Since I was making it for myself, I hadn't minded about clarity and structure that much. I could play around and fix things and add and remove on the fly. That had build up a bulky stylesheet. Not to mention all the extra templates I had built. Trying to sort through the mess, or preferably build from scratch, was way too much work.

Somewhere along the road I did small changes. I switched a photo here and another there. Something was still not working. Later, I gave the front page a little tweak. Changed the photo to something temporary, before I could decide what I wanted to do. Redesigned it a bit. It felt okay, for a second. Until I received a rude note about the new photo, from a person close to me. This obviously struck me down again, even though I pretended not to care. Talk about keeping your enemies closer...

All of those big little mental things also contributed to the fact that writing my thoughts out long form wasn't happening. Besides, I wanted to go more personal with my blog, but was afraid of... Many things. People getting upset about the things I would write. Losing readers by straying from the more information packed subjects. And other things my broken little mind was telling me.

What finally kicked me to redoing the site was listening Jenny Lawson's Furiously Happy. I don't know which part was it exactly. Probably it was the part where Neil Gaiman tells Jenny: "Pretend you're good at it." Most likely, it was all of it. It made me want to get back into writing. Whatever I could write. If Jenny could do it with her broken mind, I could do it too with mine.

I'm obviously not saying I'm her. I just mean, she made me feel less bad about feeling bad.

The site still wasn't working for me, so something had to be done. I had an idea that felt intriguing enough. A bit different, without losing my usual style.

I wanted to site remain colourful. Maybe even more colourful than it was before. There are so many muted, peachy, earthy sites out there these days. Nothing wrong with them, just can't make them apart anymore. Sorry. I kept my old colour theme, featuring more yellow than before.

The colourful led to a sprinkle of retro. A sprinkle, not going overboard with it. And since I wanted to do something different already, I wanted to utilise CSS Grid and build a bold header. Not your usual banner, but something more elaborate. Admittedly, it may not work on older browsers and obviously won't work on browsers without CSS Grid support. I may add some fallbacks at some point. Possibly maybe.

The top photo is a collage of three of my Instagram posts. I'll probably change it on the way, to feature other photos and whatnot. I like this idea, that it shows a bit of different sides of me. And I'm planning to keep it that way. Not too serious. The tangerine eyes is one of my favourites.

Navigation is never hidden behind something you have to click, like one of those burger things. And my name is big and loud. Additionally I added a little yellow text box where I can write different blurbs for different pages. Kind of intros, or descriptions what the page is about. Not all pages have the yellow box. And then there are those little details, yellow lines and borders here and there.

The headings, header and menu font is something silly and has a handmade feeling, plus it's fitting to that retro-ish theme. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I rather like it. I'm funny like that.

Eventually I decided to throw away the old templates and stylesheet and start anew. This way I forced myself to not take the easy way out and just slap stuff on all the old stuff. This means that some things may not work now and others may look a bit wonky. I may have not noticed some things that need to be styled. If you find something that doesn't work, do let me know.

That reminds me! I also decided to remove the contact form completely. I was getting mainly spam through the form. So I just scrapped it. If you want to reach me, the best way is to email me, or contact through my social media profiles.

Per usual, I keep updating the site when I feel like it. So things may change here and there. I may add stuff, remove stuff, redesign things and then some. Only way to know is to keep coming back and see yourself.

What happens with my blogging is that I already have some ideas for new posts. Some of them are more personal, others about subjects like social media or how your mind works. Perhaps I'll even get back to writing about movies, throwing in some television too. And books, why not? You know, variable subjects. I'm getting out of the corner I had put myself into with trying to stick with certain subject matters.

I won't promise you some silly schedule. The posts come when they come. You can keep up by subscribing to the RSS feed of this blog with your preferred feed reader. I recommend Feedly. My email list is in a limbo at the moment and I may scrap it. However, if there's interest for email updates of new blog posts, I may get back to that. Let me know if that's something you'd like.

Of course you can also like my Facebook page, follow me on Twitter or Pinterest, as I will share the new posts on them too. I may mention them also
on Instagram, but don't rely on that. Especially since Instagram doesn't really give a way to put links elsewhere than the profile (I don't have enough followers to get the links in stories). Or just pop around now and then to see if I have posted something new.

Whatever will be, will be. It's the beauty of this all. There's a high likelihood I will get all done with this design at some point and want to redo everything again. Hopefully that time I won't get into a full on crisis with it. Can't promise anything, since my broken mind does sometimes incredibly ridiculous things.

I do hope you enjoy your stay on my corner of the web. I won't ask you to tell me your personal information or sell your data to others. You won't be bullied by Russian bots or right wing propaganda or your generic trolls around here (unless they decide to hack my site). You can hang around and let your hair down. Clothes are optional, bullying is forbidden, and being unproductive is welcomed.

See you around!

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