Ok, so I just pushed some pretty awe­some things to my site and wanted to tell you about them! I am feel­ing the love of de­vel­op­ment again and you bet your ass I’m rid­ing this high.

First up, I added a bet­ter archive page. You can now browse by topic and se­ries. Notes are sep­a­rate from ar­ti­cles in the archive for bet­ter scan-abil­ity. I hope this helps peo­ple bet­ter find valu­able con­tent that I wrote a while ago. I’m slowly mi­grat­ing what I con­sider to be the “best” things I’ve writ­ten over the years and giv­ing them a fi­nal home on my per­sonal site. You may have no­ticed that I’m not writ­ing Bright Pixels any­more and as such, I’ve de­cided to keep things sim­ple by hous­ing it all here.

This is stuff that I feel no one else wor­ries about, but I think this is the neu­ro­sis that goes with the fun­da­men­tal be­lief of own­ing my own con­tent. I’m giv­ing my­self a bit of free­dom and let­ting go of how strict I’ve been about this though.

I used to think that I should never break links. That it was my re­spon­si­bil­ity to keep up every­thing that had ever been put on the web. I no­tice a lot of web peo­ple tend to host their archives from more than a decade ago. This sounds nice as an idea, but it’s a night­mare in ac­tual prac­tice. And I get that this has been my fault too. I lack any sort of cre­ative con­tent­ment and I seem to con­stantly cre­ate new pro­jects just to fuck­ing quit on them later when I’ve re­al­ized I don’t have the band­width to ac­tu­ally do them. in­hale. Look who’s ther­apy co­pay is pay­ing off.

Everything I’ve ever writ­ten is a lot of stuff and frankly not all of it is great. But some of it is mean­ing­ful to me. Like this post I wrote about my de­pres­sion. I’m so grate­ful I have posts like this that pre­serve who I am and what I’m feel­ing in that mo­ment. I’m a thought­ful per­son who loves to re­visit who I was and re­flect on things I can im­prove about my­self. In this par­tic­u­lar case, it’s in­ter­est­ing and heart-break­ing to read how I was feel­ing about my de­pres­sion, yet I feel ex­cited and re­lieved to feel far away from the de­spair of be­fore.

And that’s what own­ing my con­tent is all about. At the end of the day, it’s a record of me and my life. That I ex­isted. That I lived. That I loved. That I was pas­sion­ate and ex­cited about things. That I was sad and some­times could­n’t see the light at the end of a very long tun­nel. And I think it’s in­sanely valu­able to have that for your­self and for peo­ple who love you.

This is all to say that all will live here from now on and if I want to delete some­thing be­cause it no longer aligns with my cur­rent val­ues, I’ll do that too. It’s own­ing my con­tent, but’s it’s also own­ing my con­tent on my terms. And I think that’s an im­por­tant dis­tinc­tion.

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As I was say­ing, there are more cool fea­tures I added! I added a cod­ing sec­tion to the home­page that dis­plays my cod­ing ac­tiv­ity, code ed­i­tor and op­er­at­ing sys­tem, and even shows the top four lan­guages I’ve been writ­ing! I’m pretty hyped 😎

It’s all brought to you by the Wakatime API which I’d been want­ing to use for a few weeks. Then I saw Jacob Herper’s GitHub Profile and was in­spired to cre­ate my own lit­tle sta­tis­tics sec­tion. Check out the home­page to see it in ac­tion. I’m so proud of it 😍 and hope you like it.

Oh! I cen­tered the con­tent area too, be­cause the left aligned look from be­fore was bug­ging the hell out of me. I can say I tried some­thing dif­fer­ent than my usual and learned I did­n’t like it 😂

That’s it for now. I hope you’re as well as pos­si­ble dur­ing these tough times. May the force be with you, al­ways ❤️

Fri, Jul 31st, 2020 at 2:23 pm