Tech-note [43b44fe1] at [2019-01-15 14:59:55] entered by user joel on [2019-01-15 16:48:18]:
Reasons for the late pause
In summer of 2018 I kicked off this repo with a fair amount of work, thanks to a vacation and having, for once, some large blocks of time and energy to work on this project.
Since September, it’s stalled out a bit. Today I thought I’d plunk down a list of the biggest reasons why.
Mental health
This is sort of embarrassing to type, but I think it’s safe to say there’s something amiss in my mental landscape, whether the cause is internal or environmental or both.
As a parent and a wage earner I just don’t have much free time or energy to start with. But although this is a big problem, I know it would not be sufficient to block me from pursuing things I am genuinely interested in doing.
The other half of the problem comes from the fact that I go through long, unpredictable periods of time where absolutely nothing interests me.
I suspect these two issues are interrelated. On the very rare occasions where I have a predictable block of time where I know I will have no other claims on my attention (such as when I take a day off work for my birthday once a year) my interest will perk up.
Visual design blocks
There are a couple of specific aspects of the visual design where I feel blocked. These are areas where I kind of punted while making the mockups, and now I feel like I need better ideas for them before I can proceed but I’m having trouble coming up with good ideas.
The logo/header — I do not feel the logo/header in either the mockup or in trunk really does anything for the page. I’ve tried a few variations but nothing clicks. I almost wonder if the yarn/beehive thing has run its course.
The front page — I never did a mockup for the front page, and now I kind of wish I had. As to the overall structure, I have ideas that I believe will work well, but they will require a bunch of CSS and markup work and that’s a bit daunting because I think the CSS needs to be refactored a bit and there’s already quite a lot of it. Visually though, there is a question as to whether the front page should look “in-page” similar to how the blog does, or should it look “outside” of the piece-of-paper look that the individual articles have (this may not make sense to anyone but me). And if it should look “outside” just how different can it look without being too jarring?
I am open to suggestions on any of this.