Welp, seems to be an almost yearly thing – although to be honest there’s no plan to how I do things with my jtiong.* sites — it’s all very whimsical 😅
I’ve started working on a new site theme called “Chubby Snorlax‘ – a sort of sequel to “Minty Charmander” (the theme you see now on this site – as written about here).
This was mostly brought about by wanting to freshen things up when I started updating my jtiong.games website. The site itself is going to be used as a personal game server documentation and humble bragging website for all the stuff I run and mod for family and friends.
Behold!
The site design pulls back more towards engineering documentation style layouts with a little bit of a flair taken from my jtiong.network site. It’s part of an intended update to all my domain names that I’ll write about (I suppose…) in the future.
The design itself is mostly complete – with the final steps being to make sure that any content I put into the theme is represented fittingly with the design (ie. there’s no weird layout issues or formatting issues). After that, I’m not going to immediately update this blog’s theme; but rather I’ll deploy Chubby Snorlax into the jtiong.dev site first, alongside some behind the scenes updates to that site!
Minty Charmander was a fairly easy update – I was able to create a WordPress compatible theme, then roll out a similar style that matched to jtiong.dev – however, this time the workload has increased to three websites (.blog, .dev, .games) at least. So complexity of the project does grow – each site has its own unique functionality, .blog being a WordPress powered site, .dev being a stylized website that interacts with GitHub, and .games being almost entirely handwritten HTML/PHP content. I’m trying to unify their look & feel, as well as bring them all under an umbrella sort of branding “jtiong.network” like a media network or some such. It’s just a fancy hobby name for my rapidly costlier hobby.
Responsive Design
So… I’ve always been particularly lazy about responsive design. I’m (or I was) predominantly a desktop user. I spent only a very little bit of time with my mobile, tablet or any other smaller screen device that’d affect my website designs at all.
That’s kind of changed since my “semi-retirement” last year. So now, there’s a lot more conscious consideration about how Chubby Snorlax will appear in my mobile browser. It makes work a little bit more complicated and slower – I have increased page size, because I’m using the sort of archaic Twitter Bootstrap framework (she’s still good cap’n!) so almost all my content is rendered on first load, without any kind of dynamic AJAX calls or adaptive stuff that can load in things dynamically. Instead I’m using good ol’ CSS to show and hide stuff based on pixel width breakpoints.
Keeps things simple, and easy to understand for my old mind to cope with. 😂
All about Choice
It might sound surprising given how long I’ve been doing web tinkering – but I’ve never really implemented a theme selector on my own websites or projects – but I intend to do so now – allowing visitors to choose between “Chubby Snorlax” and “Minty Charmander”. They are of course, both dark themes, because I still stay glued to my computer screen for a good 12+ hours a day, so the lighter themes just hurt my eyes a lot really so I’ve got little motivation to make a light-themed design. Maybe in the future, who knows?
A bit of history…
I think, for posterity’s sake and because I’m getting more sentimental in my old age, it’s nice to look back a bit down memory lane and see the previous themes I had for this site…!
It’s really quite nice to be able to look back on the site and see progress in how things have evolved over time. Over the past couple decades, my blogging has been erratic and all over the place on various different platforms. So it’s been an effort unifying things where I can, and bringing them to a singular place.
On the other hand, it’s also been extremely rewarding being able to have a tiny corner of the internet to call “mine”.