Time and Effort conspire to continue their mutually exclusive existence in my life.
Aren't you supposed to be a web developer? Shouldn't you be making your own themes? This seems like a bit of a cop-out if you ask me
I think this is a fair question. I’d much, much prefer to be making my own themes for my personal sites (and, indeed, for Cat’s Paw Studios ones).
At 35 I'm not particularly old by modern standards, but I am tired. I feel old. I’m tired of a lot of things. Possibly thanks to ongoing health issues, possibly because there are a lot of things in the world seemingly hell-bent on tiring us all out, possibly a combination of those factors and more. Who can say?
Don't get me wrong. I still enjoy making things out of code (I recently made a Welsh-language watch face in a language I’d never even touched before), and I do very much enjoy working with Grav (Rhukster, please don't be going all-in on AI; I don't think my heart could take it).
It's more that I've gone through this blog-making process a handful of times already. Always opting to use an existing CMS as a base, sure, but then deciding (being pig-headed enough?) to make my own theme for it, from scratch.
Most of the time, what I'd make would look fine but... It'd be missing something quite important. I'd spend so much time trying to get everything to look and behave a certain way that I'd end up not actually writing anything in the blog itself. Then I’d get distracted, or fall out of the hwyl of “I’m going to write a blog!”. This, as you might expect, not particularly conducive to having a blog.
This year, I want to focus more on the writing-of-things part. Thankfully, my past years' offerings in this regard have been to the tune of "two, maybe three if you're lucky", so it's not a particularly high bar to clear!
Thanks to Grav being as easy as it is to customise, I'll likely bolt things on to the theme (Quark Open Publishing by Hibbitts Design*) as I go, or as I find I need it to do something it doesn't do already.
I would like to invite you along on this hopeful journey. I intend to use this as a one-stop shop for my entire spectrum of hobbies (read: things I'm sporadically interested in and flit between with little warning), so I can only apologise for the jumbled mess it’s likely to end up becoming.
Some things I’d like to concentrate on this year:
Lots of getting-back-into and less computer-time here. Perhaps my overall desire is a reclamation of “free time” not spent being ”productive”?
Note
*A large deciding factor, aside from already being familiar with the Quark theme, was the “chromeless” feature of Open Publishing. Explained by QOP itself: By adding the URL parameter (i.e. flag) chromeless:true to any Open Publishing Space page you can display that page's content without the global header image, site navigation bar, sidebar or footer - a great way to seamlessly embed Open Publishing Space pages into other systems.
Here is the chromeless version of this very page as an example.
Very cool!