I’ve owned this domain name for years now. I originally bought it when I was livestreaming on Twitch regularly, and I intended on using it as a project to develop a website around my stream. I wanted to try make a nice setup for viewing the stream, utilizing chat, and using another page as a repository for the VODs. I used to make playlists around the games I’d played, and I thought I could make a nice library. Unfortunately, due to some changes with Twitch video, all those videos are now lost. When I recalled it was happening, I tried to download all my VODs but I left it a little too late. Quite sad, many hours were spent both doing the livestreams and highlighting those VODs into nice playlists. Streaming was great fun. I might still set something up like that, it’ll go under Projects as a way of messing with the Twitch API. Might need to migrate from Github Pages for that, but that’s a thing for another day.

This website started a while back with the first commit on 17th September 2023. Funnily enough, followed by another called ‘First’. No idea what was doing on there. I saw some TikTok video on Flexbox usage and it made me want to play with websites a bit again. Fun thought, I may have some of my College websites from the first (and pretty much last) time I did some website work. Could end up on the Projects board under “Please don’t laugh, I was 16”. Probably all unfinished and hilariously bad. Not that this one will be insane, but it’s nice to go back and see how differently I’ll approach it. On to approaching it…

My first thoughts with this one was that I started playing with JavaScript. I did the navigation sidebar with it. It’s evolved a little bit since then, now that I’ve started updating it again. Once again, nothing special. It was following a random Python project I did of Tic-Tac-Toe. It was awful and just in console, but it was fun to get it working. I used it as an example for why my current workplace should give me a shot. My actual ‘IT’ on my CV at the time was ‘I wasn’t hired for IT, but I was doing IT. But I love it, I do Python in my spare time.’ Not an exact quote. Worked a charm though.

Onto today. Over the past couple of days I’ve gained an interest in it again. I wanted to see what was actually feasable with Github Pages. It’s static content, but how far can that go? Jekyll was the answer. Never used it, sounded interesting. A Ruby install and a couple of cmd lines later, I had my same website but significantly more broken! I have a feeling it would have been better to start with a blank slate :). But, nevertheless, I started updating all the links, moving code around, working out what the hell the _layouts directory is supposed to be, and I eventually got back to exactly what my page originally was but served on a platter by Jekyll.

Back in College, we were really only taught HTML and CSS. We were told to utilize JavaScript but all just calls to other peoples work, and then just making that work in our own websites. Had I have been more interested at the time, it would have been better to spend time outside of College work familiarizing with more languages and their potential. PHP was given to us once. Literally, given. The lecturer wrote it and said put this in your website. Not exactly teaching, but again, home learning would have been the way forward there.

My main battles have been with CSS here. The rest all flows in a way that I understand enough, and I think my main problem with CSS is trying to utilize the same classes in different contexts and hoping it’ll work identically. I am at that stage now, in that everything I’m using is technically working, but I need to sort that out for future stuff. I keep nesting parent and child and forgetting that’s not how CSS works when it is in a parent it’s not familiar with. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turned out at this stage, save for the colour scheme (as a colourblind person).

Next steps: