theholmespage2000

Drumroll Please (New Website!)

July 28, 2023

Here it is! I finally got around to making a website for myself! I’ve been meaning to learn css and all sorts of other things forever, after just ignoring learning any web dev and relying on Squarespace for a million years. Don’t get me wrong, Squarespace is really handy, but at the speed I update the site it just made more sense to me to make something static and small that I can tinker with when I feel like it. Also, I wanted to learn stuff.

When I was doing my MA in Animation, Games and Interactivity I dabbled1 in coding - I made a few little interactive scribbles that were fun but at the time felt like hell to make.

I had no idea what I was doing or where I was wanting to go with this, so I fell back on my old trusty animation and film education for the latter half of the course. This was still great, I made a micro film that won some awards, and my research on Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman and his filmmaking style MYSTIMATION was published in academic journals.

But yeah, coding? That was hard. I hadn’t actually really coded much at all before - unless you count ActionScript 2 when I was making things in Macromedia Flash MX 2004.

I felt too much pressure to be able to learn how to code at the same time as trying to create at a Masters level. Now that I’m not under that deadline crunch though, I have been able to get back into things and learn at the pace I need to.

The idea for ScreenDiary has been bopping about in my head for a really long time, and I finally got around to learning some Swift to achieve it.2 Then as part of the process of making ScreenDiary I naturally had to make a website for it - and I really just did not want to pay SquareSpace fees again. The time had come. I had to learn something web related. So I looked into various Static Site Generators, and Hugo fit my needs. I already knew how to write in Markdown so that made it easier. I played around with different Hugo themes3 but again, I wanted to learn stuff - so I learned what CSS I needed to, made that site, and then figured hey, now I know it, why don’t I do my personal site?

1. and to even call it dabbling is a major stretch ↩

2. I had heard that SwiftUI was a fairly simple starting point with learning to code - I figured it must be since you can use an iPad to make Swift things. It probably is an easy starting point but knowing what I know now I'd probably have made ScreenDiary with UIKit instead. ↩

3. of which there are heaps and I'm sure many of them are amazing! ↩

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