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 🥳