It was sometime in late spring when the decision was made. The decision to leave my beloved blogging like a hacker platform and move on to a CMS I had declared my enemy years ago. Looking back at that day now feels like it was forever ago and in a way it was. This process took longer than anticipated and it is not complete as of right now, but I still want to take a minute and talk about what was going on behind the scenes.

Note: this post is a lot of talking, some of it is technical, some of it just random thoughts, some of it about future plans. I’m not going to pretend this post has much structure; it’s more of an update of what has been going on these past few months.

BTS

A lot of things changed behind the scenes at halfapx, not only on my website, but also on other platforms that I am active. One of the biggest problems I faced a couple months ago was realizing how little control I had over the products I sold. Etsy decided to no longer find my bank information valid and support took almost three months and a threat of getting a lawyer involved until they helped me fix this issue. But at this point I knew that I did no longer want to work with a company that didn’t even pretend to care about my problem during a phone call and just told me to go back to emailing which took weeks to answer. I create websites for a living so I made the decision to go ahead and make the switch. I had considered switching from my beloved static site (my website was created using Jekyll) to a more powerful CMS like WordPress as soon as I realized that my brush creating wouldn’t really stop and it was kind of becoming hard to manage. So in this late spring I set up a localhost and decided to not go with a theme. As I said, I code for a living, and I spend too many hours fixing up WordPress themes that someone else has written. I am not good at PHP and I do not claim this theme is perfect but it is 100% self-coded and I learned a lot when I programmed custom coupons for woocommerce, custom post loops or how to calculate reading time for each post. I had a lot of fun last summer sitting in my tiny flat in the middle of the night coding away.
The shop has not made it live yet, I know. The main reason for that is finding out that Etsy is good for one thing which is figuring out taxes for every person and every country, I’m still in the process of figuring those legal things out – there will be another post once the shop actually goes live – but in the meantime there’s a couple of other things to check out.

Site

The site design has gotten a complete overhaul. I announced my new logo a while ago, since I felt like I had grown out of the old one. I sought to create a logo to combine my love for calligraphy and code yet keep it as simple as possible. I really like it and I love the way it looks as a wax seal.
I decided to incorporate more imagery in my blog, because I have since moved away from keeping this a coding blog to write more about this calligraphy obsession of mine, so Images have gotten more room. Also I will now add Videos that I upload to my YouTube channel as posts, too keep it all together and in one place. I feel like a lot of my social media and website haven’t really been coherent and I want to merge them a bit more. I am also trying to post on Facebook – but I’m still not a fan.
I still have a very minimalistic page because I just don’t like distractions when I read. Also you’ll notice my “smart” navigation is back. It’ll go away once it realizes you want to read and will show again once you scroll back up. The Blog is more categorized now, especially because I don’t want to stop writing about code even though my main post focus will probably shift towards calligraphy more. I also really want to ease my way back into writing and get comfortable with publishing thoughts and stories again, so I created a writing category as well, which will probably include all kinds of things that I do and love, that do not suit the rest of the content.
My portfolio is still not done – I don’t think it’ll be complete before I hand in the final version of my bachelor thesis and will finally cease being a student and have actual time again.

Content

I did talk about it a little bit before, but I really want to start posting more. I have thought about it forever, I used to be really good at posting a couple years ago on another blog, but this one hasn’t really gotten a lot of love. I have so many ideas and thoughts and I really want to start sharing them more, especially also start doing some reviews and comparisons and talk about projects. As I have mentioned in other places, halfapx is a place where I want to share everything I like and love and one of the things I am very passionate about is talking about products and history and research I do, because I gotta keep myself busy when I drank too much coffee to be able to sleep.

I know this post is mostly just one long string of thoughts, I’d love to hear some of yours though. Do you like the new design? Do you have any ideas on how things could be improved or have ideas of what you’d like me to write about? I’d love to get some comments and inputs!
Until soon (yes, I promise to be back soon this time)!