Welcome!
Welcome to the new site! I have recently redesigned my homepage to be a little more fanciful, and a little easier for me to keep updated.
Let's take a look at what I've actually done, section by section.
Visual
Here, the changes are fairly minor; I had some bigger changes planned, but that involved using an Instagram widget to show my more recent photos, and I scrapped that when the widget developer wanted an additional fee to operate on HTTPS pages.Instead, I've kept essentially the same functionality as I've always had here.
What may not be obvious from using the Visual section is that behind the scenes it's directly using a directory tree to assign images to galleries. The directory names become the names of each gallery, and the gallery images are generated in PHP using the directory contents. Essentially everything is automatic, so I can add new galleries by simply adding a directory. And I can update the gallery image by simply uploading new images to the gallery, or changing the directory name. Thumbnails are also automatically generated, and all generated images are cached server-side so that response times remain quick every page load.
Interactive
Just like with Visual, the Interactive section is also using a directory structure to generate its contents automatically. I have a directory called "downloads" on my server. The Interactive section reads this directory's contents and generates a list of downloads using filenames for download title. Alongside the downloads though, I wanted to add descriptions as well. So I have another directory storing text metadata, that populate file descriptions, and also provide data for non-file listings, such as the DPF demo.Literary
This is the biggest change from the old site: the Literary section finally works! I had a few literary creations I wanted to share when I developed the first version of this website, but never got around to putting them together in a useful way. So here I've finally made it easy for me to add new literary content. I created a very minimalist CMS that lets me post content (Like this, that you're reading right now), and tag it. The tags are used to determine where that content ends up, whether it's on the homepage or the literary page (or both), and eventually I'll add them to other pages as well I'm sure.This just connects to MySQL rather than doing anything exciting with files, since it's primarily text anyway rather than image or zip files.
Contact
I used to have a contact form and no other contact information on this site. But honestly I'm not that bothered about keeping all of my accounts private anyway, so I figured I'd just put them all on here. Those that I want to keep private, I can do so from the various services they link to in any case.Design
Okay this isn't a site section, I just wanted to talk about the design for a moment.I'm not a designer, truly. But I did want the site to have a look that is fun, readable, and kind of raw. I decided to go with a black and white aesthetic without any colour, transparency, or rounded borders. My only flourishes are dotted lines and the font choices, so I try to get the most play out of those that I can. My font stack is "Garamond, Didot, Perpetua, serif," which are quite fiddly fonts that look great at large sizes, but aren't the most usable for tiny text. I did this to force myself to avoid tiny text as best as possible - because my pages are so wide, I want text that uses all the available space without being overwhelming.
With the dotted lines/borders, I just want to keep the site feeling playful and exciting. The navigation hover states include both dotted and slanted lines as part of their aesthetic, which makes them distinct and give them a bit of dimensionality.
Rather than adding horizontal rules to the Interactive page, I use a left-hand dotted line to delineate items in the list, which allows each item vertical space without the user having to scroll overmuch.
The Visual section is maybe the most dramatic use of the black and white aesthetic. When you click on an image, instead of using the typical semi-transparent overlay which would undermine the stark black and white look, I use CSS gradients to construct a background of overlapping black lines at such a spacing that they form intricate lacy patterns behind each image. This gives the images focus without compromise.
What to expect
Going forward, I plan to make additional changes and improvements to the site. Beyond bugfixes, I'd like to add to the site content more steadily. I have been working on a few projects that have given me ideas for more content, and I have some interesting relics from the past to share as well.Now that I've put all this time into fixing up the site, I've got to use it! Right?