Oh, neat

in journal

Today: clearing out the backlog of things that I wanted to do on my homepage.

You know, until AppAcademy, I hadn't seen much purpose for a homepage. I remember the days of the late 90s, when everyone had a homepage with "About Me" sections that (let's be honest) no one really cared about, and then some collection of things that they cared about, like spacecraft of the Federation. (There was one guy who had a homepage dedicated to the Performa 6400, and that I used for years to diagnose issues.)

I may do something similar on my own page in time, but for now it's just a pretty good hub for everything I want people (who might want to hire me) might want to know about me.

In trying to put my best face forward, I've been customizing my hosting. Among the NEAT things I discovered today:

  • Bare git repos, and the hooks directory in a git repo, that allows you to auto-deploy files (for instance)
  • I have control over all components of my chosen theme, which means I can debug broken scripts (damn designers!)
  • It's easy to override the designer's css, especially when he barely uses classes.
  • It's easy to keep my version of given plugins up-to-date in order to use the most recent features.

I know, nothing here that's ground-breaking, but there were a couple times today that I found myself exclaiming, "neat!", if only because I figured out a way to get something closer to exactly what I wanted. … well, within a certain definition of "exactly". There are a lot of things I would do differently if I chose to build my theme from scratch, but given the constraints of using Wordpress and (most of) a pre-baked theme, it's pretty cool.

I may still SASS my page up, since SASS is cool, and choose to redo major components of the design (e.g. the font-family), but all-in-all, it's close to where I want it to be to represent me.

One thing I discovered: I haven't been nearly as consistent at posting here as I thought. The calendar widget at the bottom of the page has a LOT more gaps than I'd have believed at first. I shall try to rectify that. One change is that I intend to post more stuff that may not be public up there (here), including blog posts that don't have anything to do with AppAcademy. All in due time.