New portal, new me. If it doesn't take forever and a day then it's not true MACHINEHEAVEN work, I say. I've finally made it to making an update for the underside of this site that's presentable, although certainly with room for expansion....

Despite my love for the old theme I was ready for something new, something a little more dirty and organic. I'm pleased with being able to keep it fairly simple, although naturally not every page will follow the same layout. Gotta keep it fun and all that. But I'm pleased with my work.

As is typical of me, I'm writing this while not being able to sleep, so I'll keep it short. But I will include a diary I kept while working on the update, thinking out loud a bit about what I was doing——come cringe at the ballooning gaps between the dates I worked on it, if you'd like....!

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SITE UPDATE DIARY

*** apr 12
I've been looking around for low-effort things to do with my weekend (feeling a bit uhhh sluggish let's say from my current bount of seemingly-unending sickness, lol) and I decided to just keep going on my website renovation, since my idea for the portal area has more or less crytallized. Of course building this is not exactly "low effort" in the traditional sense, but I suppose I mean it more in the sense that it's not time-sensitive, I enjoy doing it, and if I mess it up nobody else will mind. It's difficult to draw a line between work and play in my self-employed scenario, so choosing something Definitely Not Work but that still has a final product that I've created is.... nice! And, I'm hoping to have a nice home for my non-standard projects here. I sincerely doubt many people will look at this place compared to my social media posts, but it will hopefully be a nice treat for those who do make the trek.

I'm starting with the front page, since that is pretty concrete in my mind and I gotta start somewhere. I like to design a single main page from start to sorta-finish and then use that to expand outward. I've got a little layout sketch made up, but we'll see how close the final product ends up to that.

I'm also starting here because I've been looking back on the variety of websites I enjoy, and I will say that while I do absolutely adore people's personal websites, I think there's a minority of people who tend to go.... a little nuts.... on their front pages. Loads of tiny text and graphics all crammed together.... It hurts my eyes/brain to read LOL. So, I want to work on my own front page while this is all fresh in my mind, and see if I can get some of that comfortable clutter while balancing readability. I guess you'll find out when this goes up!

*** apr 14
It's the first day that's actually warm in weeks, and finally feeling like spring for a moment (there was snow on the ground again just yesterday). I'll admit I'm not really supposed to be working on this right now, but I've been having fun so whatever.

Themeing continues to be a major puzzle for me, but I skipped past my usual choice of paper textures after a lot of unsatisfying fiddling and landed on a more industrial look instead. I started with the inspiration of a paranormal/conspiracy site, but kept ending up with things too light/bright for my intentions; rusty metal has worked out better, although even this I'm not totally sold on. It's reading a little Halloween-y... but hopefully it'll grow on me! I think once I can decide on a banner image it'll all tie together nicely.

Hours later, now——I've finally made a breakthrough after much more useless fiddling. Keeping it simple seems to be the key for a dark, textured layout that doesn't give "2000's Guy Site" vibes, lol. I'm super happy with what I went with instead, although obviously the front page needs to be adapted. In the mean time I've built out the "Web Inspiration" page as a test for the more functional pages, which was extremely enlightening and I think what got me to put the pieces together about what would look good. I'm putting it down for now so I can go to bed but I'll probably be up thinking about it, haha.

*** apr 15
Completed 'web inspiration', 'year in review', 'free graphics', 'toys and scraps', 'tutorials', and 'site layouts', along with some final tweaking to the styling. Making 'web inspiration' took forever since I was digging through my bookmarks and writing little descriptions (and checking that the sites I wanted to link still existed ha--they don't all!), but the rest were pretty quick aside from having to format/condense some images.

*** apr 17
I've poured a fair amount of time into.... um.... something I can't really outline yet here. I thought it would be simple and straightforward and I could include it in the initial launch of this version of the site, but oops, it turned into a multi-page thing and I think it's going to have to wait! Which is fine, I'd really like to share it as its own thing now that it will be this extensive.

Aside from that little project, things are mostly up and running. The sidebar as it is now is missing some of the links that I'll put up eventually, but I don't want a third of the stuff on my site to lead to work-in-progress pages, so I'm going to wait until I have something to put there. Besides, it'll give me things to add later. The two major projects left are an update to the 'profile' page (which honestly I may delay with only some minor adjustments instead of redoing it entirely, we'll see), and to fix up the front page with a proper banner and the missing graphics.

Also note to self, get the scanner hooked up....

*** apr 20
Feeling very down these past few days. This evening I wrote a lot for a draft of a tarot shrine page I want to make, and polished up what was already there. My god.... I talk a lot about that stuff. Way too long.

*** jul 15
Hot summer night in a string of the same. Thankfully I'm pretty tolerant of it, although it got me to cut the sleeves off of old shirts finally. No longer constantly sick thanks to some supplements but still feeling quite down. Also you can see how I tend to flip through projects and leave them for months at a time, ha....

Polishing up the details of the front page, although I'm still not sure about the banner image. I've been feeling a bit inspired by the cover of Depeche Mode's album Ultra and that general 90s/2000s grunge graphic design look. I actually have a book about graphic design of that era (of course I do, lol) so maybe I'll flip through that for some inspiration.

Still hemming and hawing about the sidebar organization but I'll get there. Fiddling with these details helps soothe my anxiety a bit, although I've already stayed up too late. Also I can't decide if I want to embed the previously mentioned project as a secret to be found or just present it straightforwardly.... and in the case of the latter, do I put it on toplevel too? Much to think about.

*** nov 23
Blitzed through my new about-me page with a cute little gimmick that was a big pain in the ass lol. My bullshit solution to get a snippet of javascript to work saved me in the end. Not totally sure how I feel about it but it's cute enough so whatever, maybe I'll see some tweaks to make later. I've been working on a few other aspects too that I haven't been noting down.

Now pretty much the only two things stopping me from being finished with this base update is the front page and the "Selected Works" gallery. Front page needs a banner image and a little piece of deco but i have zeroooo ideas..... oops... Selected Works needs me to select the aforementioned works and also organize the gallery somehow. Site updates have been extremely low priority due to me being exhausted and having IRL things to keep up with but maybe someday, lol.

*** feb 26
Couldn't sleep so I'm up working on this, as I'm suddenly possessed to do. Came up with some ideas for the final front page decorations, added 2025's art in review to the page (really taking me that long, huh.... oh well) and tweaking some WIP pages that I'm not getting done to post haha. No way I'm sorting through selected works any time soon so might as well just get the site up--it took me forever to get the toplevel gallery up, so it's par for the course.

I thought I'd get up and chip away at things but with these changes (and my willingness to abandon some things for future days) the site update is.... done. Huh!

I still have lots of things I'd like to add, but I feel better about tackling them one at a time now that the framework is set up to house them. I'm sure I'll manage to do it extremely slowly, but better slow than not at all, right?

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2.26.2026