I think a lot of creators say, “When you have a nice space, it makes you want to use it more” or something along those lines for creative output. Having nice tools makes you want to use them more, a nice chair to sit at, or a powerful PC, shiny power tools to make things, etc.

That philosophy even rings true for something as basic as an online blog (well, now more of a whole damn website). Since deciding to redesign my site and consolidate it all, it’s given me ikigai and really, it’s become a joy to start updating my this site (and even this blog) a lot more.

I won’t go so far as to say my aim this year is to blog more or do more content – but I’d like to foster a better environment around which I can update this site more often, be it with blog posts, or new site features, or otherwise.

An evolution of my website’s themes

Independent Publisher is a fantastic theme – I loved how simple and straight to the point it is. I actually came across this theme when I started following a Minecraft Modder back in the early halcyon days of Minecraft’s modding scene, the early alpha and beta days. There was a modder by the name of Sk89q (Albert Pham) who actually developed one of the most important mods that propelled Minecraft into its modern day popularity, WorldEdit. His blog had this theme in a nice neutral toned colourway that made it easy to read and keep up with a lot of his (sometimes not so) little projects. I immediately took to using the same theme, with a few little tweaks of my own, and left it mostly at default with a colourway change for things.

Minty Charmander is my own from-scratch WordPress theme, the first time I’d actually properly done something like this without just hacking other themes or shoe-horning other layouts in. I made this theme shortly after meeting my fiance Annie 🥰. One could even go so far as to call her my muse! The theme’s nomenclature came from our shared enjoyment of the earlier Pokemon games (Red/Blue) and how we both chose Charmander as our starting Pokemon.

The design began as a way to “modernise” the look of the site, and it was the first attempt at sharing a common design language between mutliple domains (jtiong.blog and jtiong.dev) — in fact, you can still see the older Minty Charmander design applied to jtiong.dev (as of the time of writing!)

Chunky Snorlax is of course, the current incarnation of the site, and a much larger project than just a WordPress theme. It too is written from the ground up, but with a few hard requirements to the project such as:

• The site must be usable on mobile
• Discord integration for my personal community must be implemented
• It must be able to handle private gated sections for family, or friends

The project is like Minty Charmander, targeted towards unifying the domains under jtiong.com as well as having consistent branding across the sections of the domain that they’ll become; and is in fact, so large that I even have it documented in Notion for task tracking and managing what I’ve done so I have a reference to come back to in future development.

It’s an interesting development project for me because after a few years away from the tech industry, I’m finally dipping my toe back into coding and learning some skills along the way, at my own pace 😃

The site will continue being a desktop first website. I’m always designing and developing the site based off how it appears on my personal desktop, before making the design responsive and accommodating for mobile resolutions afterwards.

Improving standards in publishing posts

I’ve been a WordPress user for a long time in regards to this blog – about 10 years apparently. But it’s always been a secondary, perfunctory usage. I’ve always just very basically logged in, dumped what was in my head into a post, and hit publish.

Since I started with Minty Charmander during July 2024, I started to use more features of WordPress’s editor like Galleries, and photo uploads properly. And with the blog’s current iteration, I’ve started:

• paying attention more to CSS styling (partially due to design hard requirements above)
• learning to use the built-in lightbox feature and some improvements with it
  • the lightbox now loads the source image in full res when you click on them instead of delivering an upscaled thumbnail with the native WP feature
• learned that adding image captions improves traffic to my site
• the tags and categories system needs some refinement, but works fairly well
  • I need to go through my posts and re-tag and re-categorise as appropriate!

So it’s nice to see that putting in the effort into the site has also meant I’ve started improving my own methods and processes for creating content here. It’s an older form of content, I’m not a YouTuber or some sort of highly skilled video editor; and it’s never a “no” but for now, I enjoy the written word more. And so I rant on the internet using this blog 🥳

The new update to jtiong.com brings with it not only the Blog – but also an attempt to roll in all the content of my other domains into it. I come across an interesting dilemma – I haven’t really got a plan for the design of the site per se… I have content – yes, that’s easily pulled from the existing Minecraft info website (at the soon to be defunct jtiong.games domain), but no actual design idea.

The Old Design

Below is a set of screenshots of the jtiong.games Minecraft section:

Deciding Requirements…

The “original” design had a number of features I’d really like to pull over to this current site – like the Whitelist section – I was particularly proud of that section having fought with bootstrap CSS to try and get a nice layout happening. The Whitelist also allowed authenticated users to dynamically add themselves to the Whitelist without any manual intervention on my part. It was convenient, and looked cool!

Here’s the thing though, all that information, all those features – they’re split up across 4 or 5 separate pages! And I don’t think I should have an online form where my friends can arbitrarily add people to the server’s Whitelist – just for posterity’s sake. It is meant to be our FOREVER SERVER after all. People who join the server should be vetted and added when a human moderator is able to.

The Requirements

Thanks to my ranting above — I have an idea for some design requirements now:

• Condense the server information into less pages
• Find a way to integrate the Server Map nicely into the site design
• Display the whitelist in a reasonable way (a list maybe?)
• Integrate a way to see posts I make about Minecraft (and the server) into the page(s)
• Make this section easily viewable on mobile (this is a hard requirement across the whole site)

The New Design

Behold! The new design!

Almost everything about the server, fits on the one page! With the exception of the World Map – a visitor can view everything they need about the server, although the Player Whitelist is hidden for unauthenticated visitors.

There’s a few adjacent tasks for jtiong.com’s upgrade to proceed in tandem with the rest of this section’s update, but for the time being, this’ll serve all my requirements!

So, it’s been a pretty quick pivot recently as you might’ve gleaned from my previous blog post – but I’m consolidating all my domains under a single jtiong.com domain name. And not wanting to throw away the hard work of Chubby Snorlax from my jtiong.games and jtiong.network domain names – I’ve begun slowly shaping the existing site you’re reading right now into what is called “Chunky Snorlax” – a similar theme (still following the Pokemon theme for things – Annie’s a big fan of Pokemon of course) with a twist, the “Chunky” nomenclature is because the site is just full of stuff from my other domain names.

True to form, it’s a darker themed site as usual – although there are some nicer features I’ve implemented including:

• Update to Bootstrap v5.3.8 which is the latest version
  • This also include Bootstrap Icons v1.13.1
• There’s now an image Lightbox overlay that I’ve tweaked for viewing images (for future posts going forward – it’d take me forever to update things retroactively sadly)
• There’s a more considered approach to the mobile version of the site now (tidier menus)
• There’s now a Tag Cloud (although I don’t know many people that browse that way?)
• Captions on images now appear with a frosted effect at the bottom of images too (FANCY!)

I’m hoping to keep this theme around for more than 12 months this time around, but I think going forward it’ll be less a “brand new revamp” and more of an evolution of design going forward as the needs of the site evolve too.

Chunky Snorlax is probably the most “complete” WordPress theme, I’ve built to date. There’s no doubt a lot of bugs and issues, and the theme itself is very simplistic, but it’s mine, and it’s built from scratch, warts and all 😄

Hope you all enjoy it 👍

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.