site – Dave Kellam

Make your own website

Meant to post this article a year ago when I first read it, For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website.

This almost reads like me in my early teens:

Browsing the internet used to be a hobby of mine. Ever since my dad got us a modem when I was around ten, I spent hours at a time just looking at different websites. The internet felt like a limitless expanse of free expression. Now, despite how many more people use the internet, I usually end up at the same three or four websites, and I end up a lot more bored.

Part of the appeal of the internet when I was young was making your own website. I taught myself HTML as a tween to facilitate that desire. Free web hosting on sites like Angelfire or Geocities was abundant, and you could waste an entire day just looking at the dumb things people put online.

This year marked the 25th anniversary of starting a blog, then a few months later buying my first domain.

To celebrate the blog’s anniversary in May, I started a new theme, but never finished. Then considered working on it again around the domain anniversary in August, but never got around to it.

After a week or two of yak shaving (video example), I’ll activate my 90s style construction banner plugin and starting messing around again in public.

A post every day in 2022?

I get lazy with my personal sites. A side-effect of working on the web most days. There’s a strong desire to disconnect.

But… I also open a lot of tabs.

In the past these tabs would’ve been blog posts. Things I found interesting or needed, or wanted to find later. Now, I just close out groups of tabs and briefly remember what I was researching.

Content aside, there’s also the design and code side of the site. It’s time to revisit.

Maybe a post a day is a lofty goal and I’ll fail tomorrow, but it’s some motivation.

For the old eightface readers, there’s a posts feed available if you’d only like to see longer form stuff and not the life updates.

Created a record collection page. It’s pretty raw at the moment, mostly spitting out the text lists I made while yak shaving the other night.

My blog turned 18 last week. It’s now old enough to vote. I marked the occasion by moving it from eightface.com to davekellam.com ???

Sorted out how to generate a post title and slug from the body content when you save a post. Useful for micro blogs that don’t really need the title field.

So it seems underscores currently has a platform agnostic solution for sass. Will need to sort out something to generate the css, one of my gulp or grunt scripts, or maybe just CodeKit for now.

Added a colophon to the site

I am remembering the use of animated gifs to indicate that your site was under construction. Is that still a thing?

Posted to Twitter for the first time in a long time tonight. Part of starting to post here. Will sort out how to crosspost at some point.

A rough guide for setting up WordPress as a microblog. It’s definitely possible to do with default themes and off-the-shelf components. I’m going to dork out and customize it. The source will be available.

Starting to customize the theme to work as a micro blog. It always seems to start with my local development environment no longer working. Live cowboy coding used to be so easy, but copy-paste or multi-undo version control sort of sucks.