Everything's coming together. I've been learning a lot, and I'm finally ready to share my work.
Welcome to Blessfrey.me, my online portfolio and design blog! After using it privately (or at least as privately as anything can be online) to practice webdev and biweekly blogging for a year, this site is ready for visitors.
The last time I did any webdev was back when every website had custom HTML+CSS profiles, so I'm stunned by how far web technology has come along, both in terms of capability and ease of implementation. Man, I wish we had the CSS grid to lay out old petsite pages! I feel up to speed now, though. My confidence in maintaining and upgrading my website is solid. Same for writing articles. They're at a good length, level of organization, and readability. Writing for just yourself and writing for someone else are two completely different mindsets, you know?
Of course, I'm not saying Blessfrey.me is great, I'm saying I'm not ashamed anymore. People with a harsh inner critic understand what a hurdle that is.
I'm going to take this somewhat professionally (I mean, I'm no business suit avatar "no offers under 100k" person), so I have a release schedule and content mix and everything. I'll return to social media, too. All that pandemic news was hard to look at, but I miss seeing other people's projects and meeting fellow devs. My Twitter is @lilchimchooree, and my Mastodon is also lilchimchooree.
So please bookmark and visit every other Thursday (US time) for new articles! Also, message me wherever. I don't mind chatting.
I never really had a plan for how to use this site and was generally copying other portfolios and blogs. Having your own website is really cool, though. Unless I'm somewhere else for a community, there's no reason for me to still be fussing with image hosting services or any kind of content management tool. My server, domain, and custom code should cover everything. It should be the easiest thing in the world to show people what I've been working on, too - just show them my website, duh.
So what should I do with my website? Whatever I want. It should be obvious, but the drive to copy others and meet standard expectations is so hard to break.
First, I'm going to have embedded HTML5 applications. I'm not waiting for Blessfrey's first demo to do that, either. I'm making gamejam projects, prototypes, anything interesting, and slapping them right on the website. After all, a gamedev website should have games!
Second, I'm going to share programming and fashion projects. I used to have a separate fashion portfolio and a few blogs, but I was always struggling to match the guidelines for online content. It's more freeing to give myself a blank section of my general portfolio and a tenth of the blog to fill however I want. Some fashion designers like Kenneth D. King don't even organize their ideas into seasonal collections. The industry as a whole is reconsidering rigid expectations, replacing in-person runway shows with alternatives like direct press meetings, fashion photography lookbooks, and short art films. Why shouldn't a fashion blogger re-evaluate her portfolio?
Best practice says to be an SEO zombie laser-focused on a niche, but that doesn't make sense for me. I develop websites, games, programming projects, fashion projects, interior design projects, pixelart, writing, and more, and people in my life ask to see them. I want to work for actual people, not an algorithm.
Blessfrey.me's needs are fairly simple - some static pages and a blog page. Blogging platforms are overkill for my purposes, and all those unused features would bog down the website at best and contribute to security vulnerabilities at worst. Also, they tend to collect private user information, and I'd rather not be responsible for that right now. So I write and maintain this site from scratch. It's plain fun to write my own platform. Besides, it just makes sense for my programming portfolio to be something I programmed.
I always thought PHP developers were so cool as a kid, so Blessfrey.me was originally written in PHP. That didn't last long. I could compare pros and cons, but PHP was too unenjoyable to maintain. Its documentation is crazy, though. Each page has a comment section with 19-year-old posts criticising the language. So bizarrely negative and old!
Now I use Bottle, a Python micro web-framework, its built-in template engine SimpleTemplate, and HTML and CSS. It's deployed using Docker. Any embedded applications are probably HTML5 written in Godot Engine.
The website has plenty of room for improvement. It looks pretty wonky on mobile and tablets, and I've only been testing in Firefox and Chrome-based browsers. It's functional and has a decent amount of content, though, so I'd say it's a-okay to take out of maintenance mode for now.
Next I'm going to work with every resolution I can get my hands on and iron out the code. Each page is wordy and unstructured, but I'll rein them in soon. I'll also properly implement my character database, so I don't have to use clunky Toyhouse anymore.
Don't go through the motions. If you have anything super cool like a website, don't just use it how you're "supposed" to use it. Put your possessions to work and have fun with them!