Website Identity Crisis

Why do I keep re-designing my website every few months??

Experts still aren't sure.

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I wouldn't quite describe myself as a perfectionist. I think there are parts of that label that apply, but not enough for me to say that I am one. Selective perfectionism? Maybe that describes my situation.

Except that it isn't perfectionism. I'm not necessarily iterating over and over and over again on my website to get it to look closer to one single vision I have in my mind. I'm completely re-inventing the whole design of the site, more often than I expected to.

I like when things work. When they work in a way that makes sense to me. In a way that feels good to me. I like that my website and blog are, at the core, written in Markdown (with styles applied later). I like that I've got linting and code formatting running on the repository that houses this site, not because I am trying to improve the quality of any code that goes into it, but because I think it looks pretty. I've even changed linters a couple times throughout the course of having this website, because each time I found a new tool did things in a way that just felt nicer.

Personal websites are an extension of the self. No, that's too lofty, too faux-philosophical. Personal websites are... My personal website is... how I share myself online, in the least corrupted form. I'm not optimizing for a social algorithm. I'm barely optimizing for SEO (**shudders**). I want this place to feel like me.

And how I feel changes. Not infrequently, even! About what music I want to listen to, about what I want to wear, about how masculine or feminine I want to be perceived, about how I feel about myself. And, as evidenced by the changes this website has been through, about what I want my website to look like.

I felt like my last redesign really worked. I really, really liked how it turned out. So why, oh why, did I have the sudden thought on August 13, only months after switching to this layout, "Hm... but do I love it?"

Make it more minimal, my inner monologue chanted. More text, less... pizzas... I mean, pizzazz, damn I'm hungry, it demanded.

And away I chopped, reducing default.liquid down to a mere 48 lines of basic layout markup. Sure, there was still Tailwind, doing some major work for the remaining styling, and sure, there were still lines and lines of templated includes being injected, BUT... I'd reached a point where things felt... "right" again.

Meet my new design. For now. Did I go too far? Did I express myself too hard?

I'm gonna go enjoy a brownie and a scoop of vanilla ice cream; I felt like baking this week.