New blog theme, new homepage, new me

It’s that time of year again. Birds shake pollen from trees, young men rev their cars by the waterfront, and I change the blog theme for no apparent reason. Or, supposedly, the reason being that my old theme relied on plugins which weren’t compliant with php8, but whatevs, here we are and I’m running a modified Twenty Fifteen. I tried making it ugly-fun, but maybe it’s just ugly, time will tell.

Speaking of ugly, I’m also finally redoing my homepage at monocultured.com, which has been living in a decrepit Koken CMS for years without updates. I’ve written about this before, and I’ve spent too much time just trying to decide between a simple html/css system, a static site builder, a minimal CMS, or another WordPress install. Like, I’ve literally spent at least a hundred hours trying different solutions out without being happy with any.

I thought I’d found a friend in Automad CMS but it was slow as molassess. This could be due to my cheap shared hosting, but after five minutes of looking into migrating to a dedicated server I luckily saw the procrastination for what it was and abandoned the task. I almost bit the bulled and got a cargo.site but I don’t want recurring fees. the mmm.page which I used for the WITP project isn’t responsive and creates a bit too much bloat to be used for a whole site, so that’s out.

So fuck it, I’m just relearning html/css for the n:th time and am making an ugly-fun site all of my own, and I’m doing it live. What will take the most time – as it should – is deciding what to include and doing the writeup for each project/set. We’ll see, but since I’m hoping to take unpaid leave from work soon, I’m going to need a portfolio site of some sort. (Also, I still have pozar.se for a more proper contact surface)

One headache for the site development is hosting video. I’ve used Vimeo previously, but can’t motivate the cost any longer, and migrating my stuff to Youtube is depressive as all hell – I’d rather not feed content to Google if I can avoid it – so once I get the website up and running I might as well copy/paste some javascript as well. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn something!