💾 Archived View for daintyeco.smol.pub › de-fragmentation captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:28:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I have emerged from my little break to focus on myself and my studies! A lot of weight has fallen off my shoulders. One exam went well, the other one was a fail, but I feel very at peace with it. It's even better than not knowing the outcome and speculating on the grade for weeks. I have learned a lot and tried my best, and next time will be better. For the fact that I had a lot of health issues this summer that prevented me from effectively studying, I did surprisingly well.
Those were some really tough weeks with a lot of tears, but I have bounced back almost instantly after the last exam was done. Thinking about how much time I will now have for reading, coding, exercising, taking walks, sewing, gaming and other things just fills me with joy. I smiled a lot today, randomly throughout my day. Ironically, now that I don't /have/ to, I feel oddly motivated to continue studying for my upcoming semester. I am forcing myself to do more enjoyable things I did not get to do the past few weeks before I get back to that though.
This little break has reinforced for me that I am currently dedicated to my health, my girlfriend, my dog, my studies, my own little hobbies and projects and my groups of (online) friends. Returning to my online life now, it feels a little hectic and fragmented. I find myself not wanting to return to most of it - it feels so much to keep track of. I think it was fun for me, but now it isn't as much anymore. I think I will reassess and redesign a bit!
I assume it's very common to want to rework your website pages a lot - refine it more, improve the code, add something. Then you learn so much, and your websites barely keep up with your improvement! Every few days or weeks you're sitting on it.
Now there is so much to fix, tweak and bring up-to-date. I've been unhappy with the pages for my crafts for ages, for example. And there are a lot of pages I wanted to rework or make mobile-compatible.
I've thought about it now, and came to the conclusion that I will downsize my website. What I want to be focusing on is simply a lot bigger and more important than keeping my website(s) in check and going over the same pages over and over again.
I want the info to be more concise, and less pages to have to update - not only the actual content, but the code too. This will free up my time and the mental space at the back of my mind that is always nagging about having to update info, or fix this or that code.
Specifically, I think pages dedicated to my projects and crafts will be consolidated or removed altogether. I simply do not feel the need to display my things anymore. It's not that I am ashamed of them or fear judgement or don't think they are good enough, but I just have enough other outlets - friends' Discord servers, real life people, or via email conversations. And after the conditioning that social media use starting at age 12 has worn off by now, it oftentimes is enough that it's just me who sees it and no one else. I am kind of proud of this development, because I used to do a lot of things just to post about them when I was a teen, and even later felt like I had to post what I made or else it would be worth less.
Not displaying it or any progress on my little hobbies has one advantage: I don't feel guilty for not updating or showing visible progress. Some of my sewing projects are 1,5 years old now, it is what it is. I think changing what I do with these pages will help in not feeling like I should be updating them much more frequently and creating pressure where none should be.
Related to that, I will probably leave webrings and stop displaying them on my website, and I will likely remove the buttons to other people's pages. I know this is a totally antisocial move and something not really appreciated in web revival spaces. Personal websites and the more fragmented, spread out small web lives off of word of mouth and linking to each other. Through that, a lot of "follow4follow"-esque culture has emerged, and it is custom to follow back for courtesy, or only put someone's button up your page when they do it too. I have always rejected these things and only put the button on my page when I personally wanted to no matter if the linked person would ever use mine. But what brings me to my more drastic move is that while I check many websites attentively for updates, I don't really have the capacity to do it for all, and I have no time to check webrings either, or to constantly check for broken links. Most importantly, I have no capacity to be up to date on difficult discussions and online fights and how some people position themselves in some topics. There is some anxiety on my part about people taking it as support for some views when I am in the same webring as someone else or linking to someone's site. It sometimes makes me think webrings have not aged well with today's internet etiquette/politics.
I just honestly often find myself clueless about events and things that went down online while I was absent or simply not in the same space and I just don't really feel like having to keep up with things just to be ready for the potential fallout.
Keeping out of webrings and the buttons would be a further step in reducing the mental effort I have to put into my online presence, but I don't feel 100% final about this yet.
I was wondering if I should delete Cohost and Status.Cafe as well.
Cohost strikes me as a very creative place, full of very knowledgeable people and lots of tech tips. I enjoy the amazing post designs ("CSS crimes") and challenged myself to create two of my own. But it's another place I barely check and that sits mostly dormant, and a space that can induce feelings of "letting my followers down", which are indeed loser feelings, but I know I am not alone in this and it is instilled into many of us from other socials. I just don't have much to say, and when I do, I prefer to do it here or on my website. CSS crimes are fun, but ultimately a bit useless - I should be working on other things that will teach me more long term, especially because CSS crimes do not teach me proper CSS - it just teaches me how to bypass post restrictions via inline HTML and some Cohost quirks. I am still hesitant because of the rich community especially around programming and Linux.
Status.Cafe is very cool and a nice little widget thing, but in the future I am trying to move to, little updates like that simply won't matter much anymore and are not planned. I need more time for my studies, for my Steam Deck CSS coding, for The Odin Project, for learning Rust, for Linux ricing, for pixel art and sewing. These are just the things I feel drawn to the most at the moment, not little tweaks and changes here and there. It will be more substantial changes discussed here or in a tech blog I am still building up. My omg.lol has a "now page" that gives me more freedom to precisely show what I am up to now.
I think the rest will stay the same. I'm thinking of switching hosts because I don't really like the Neocities social feed and my sites are tied to a main site that is not even in use anymore, but that decision is really far away as of yet.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, I feel happy about it.
One thing that I struggle with is my new redesign for my little pink website that incorporates the above changes. I have grown fond of my website design, and I have poured so many hours into it over the course of this year - the art for it alone took over a 100 hours. I think with coding and the additional pages that emerged over time, it must be 200 by now. And I got soooo many compliments for it!
But it's important for me to step back and think about if I really want to keep some elements of it because it makes sense and I want it, or because I feel like I owe people this design who have known this website for a while now.
With the existing design, it is hard to clear my head and treat it as if I had no website yet and how I would design it if there wasn't one in place already. If it happens to be similar to my current design, I want it to happen because I feel drawn to create it, and not because this already exists. There will definitely be a link to the old design though, at least a screenshot of it.
I am also struggling with some design principles - do I wanna make it easy and do a vertical design on desktop this time that is easier to be mobile compatible almost by default, or a separate desktop and mobile design, so that a horizontal desktop design can easily be stacked vertically for mobile use?
It really bothers me that we leave so much space unused when we just use the center vertical space on desktop, but horizontal is simply not the choice with mobile content consumption (aside from videos and games). There's a challenge in doing something amazing and possibly unique with both formats.
I apologize for any email I haven't answered in the meantime - I should now be freed up to pay more attention to that.
𓇽 ° . ༻ 𓈒 ꒪ ๋ ° .𓏲⠀ ๋࣭ ♡ ͘ ࣭⠀⸰ ⋆ ֗ ִ ᨒ .⋆ﾟ. ͘ ࣭⠀⸰ ♡ 𓂂 ◌ 𓇽 ° . ๋ 𓂂 ⠀✼ 𓇽