Change, again

About a month ago, I made a note titled "Switching back to Laravel". The idea was to make of my website what I wanted it to be, a place for me to create and collect stuff that I like and that makes me feel things.

In that post I was asking about how long I was going to be able to keep up without feeling the need to change it all over and now we have an answer, about a month. And when I wrote that note, I really had the hope of being able to keep my thing going, to make it evolve with me and take care of it, to cite myself, I said:

I hope this time I'll be able to make this website evolve, endure the updates and the maintenance, and instead of nuking everything when my mood swings, tend to this garden that I'm trying to grow.

But here we are a month later and this website is changing again. And I hope I have learned lessons from my past failures and have finally found something that will last for a while. (Wishful thinking, but I have a plan).

So what was wrong about the previous edition? The website looked great (Or at least exactly like I wanted it to look) and it did everything I wanted it to in a superb way. This shows us that maybe the problem wasn't about the site, but rather about me, my relationship to the site and what I wanted vs what I felt like doing.

This is a recurring problem in my life, there are things that I want but I'm rarely willing to put the effort into getting these things. For example on this website I wanted to share the music I like, the books I've read, pictures of my life, notes and journal entries, websites I like etc. And I had made a really nice design for all these things, I had so much fun making this design! I even coded some of them and really enjoyed coding these features and solving the problems that came my way. Now you might argue that I said I didn't want to put the effort into things but still went out of my way to code and design them, that's some effort at least. But to me, these are not real efforts. Designing and coding are two of the things I enjoy most in life and doing the stuff you enjoy is easy enough. The hard part comes when I actually have to add content to the site. Taking pictures to put as album covers or photos for the website, checking that all things look good and that it's accessible, moving the stuff I had written in Obsidian to the admin. These are all things I hate, and therefore this super website that was ready to be used stayed empty. If there had been a way to just think "I like this song" and it would have been magically added to the site, it would have been great, but in the absence of mind control powers, I couldn't find the will to tend to the website.

So when I had accepted defeat and knew that I was just gonna not do things, I started looking for a solution. And the idea I had was to look into the things that I am able to do consistently because I enjoy them. And one of these things it turns out is taking notes! I have been doing it for months pretty consistently and I don't see myself stopping any time soon. The solution was then very simple and very clear: cut out the middleman.

I got to thinking, testing, prototyping, designing, and I came up with this site on the other end. On your part, it just looks like a blog with a nice backdrop, but on my side, once I am logged in, the text of the notes becomes editable, and with the press of a couple buttons, I can create a new note and publish it instantly!

And these notes of course can contain anything I want, for example here's a picture of one of my cats! image

This means that if I want to make a note with all the books I read or a note with links to all the websites I like, I obviously can. It won't look as cool as the design I had planned on the previous iteration, but at least it will exist, and at the end of the day, that is what really matters to me.

The thing I am looking for in my website is for it to be a place where I can create things however I want at anytime I want and make them accessible instantly. If I have a 2 minutes break waiting for pasta water to boil and want to write a little something about my love for pasta, well I can! There is no faff to it, no writing somewhere then having to move it to the site, then checking it looks good etc. I just open my site which I've bookmarked on my phone's homepage, hit "create note" and start writing.

And I know myself, right now I think this is great, but the likelihood of me wanting more or wanting less in a couple of week's time is really high. That's why I'm going to make a list of rules in this note that I will try my best to respect, I think that having it written down somewhere will help me feel a little more accountable.

A little technical note for those interested: The website is open source. It uses Laravel + Livewire under the hood to handle the editor part but should be perfectly fine without any JS for all readers. The backdrop is made using a few CSS animations that have a duration of 24h and is representing the time that it is currently where I live (In Belgium). An offset is calculated when the page loads and is then injected into the CSS using a custom variable.