It’s been over three years since I last posted on this blog and even though my activity on Instagram has dwindled as well, it is somewhat surreal to me right now how long it actually took to get this done.

But it is now complete enough to give into the tradition of commemorating major changes with a blog post. So it’s only fitting that I do so again. But this time, I have an entire series to look back on.

This “halfapx Reinvention” series now has two prequels and I have thoughts looking back.

In Part 1, I decided to break out of the shell I had tried to force myself into and vowed to not niche down.

A representation of myself is a representation of what I love. And if you reduce it down, it is fairly simple to find out what I am all about.

I am all about words. I am all about emptiness to be filled.

Give me an empty plate and I will have to cook or bake something. Give me a sheet of paper and a brush and I will fill it with lettering. Give me a Laptop and an Editor and I will want to code. Give me a notebook and a pen and I will write a story. Give me a second of silence and I will fill it with words about something I like.

And I just won’t shut up.

moi, 2016, Reboot

I still wholeheartedly agree with 22y/o me. And this is what I set out to do with halfapx.

This was my mission statement

Halfapx is my personal empty page. I don’t want to restrict myself. Halfapx is my platform. Halfapx is just about my words. It is not a tutorial blog. It is a space where I want to write about everything I love. Everything I am about.

me, just one love declaration on monospace later, 2016, Reboot

Basically, halfapx was declared to be the vessel to hold my chaotic type of creativity. And it was. For a while.

But then my Instagram really got started, and I launched an Etsy and Etsy did me dirty.

So, I decided to code my own shop with WordPress and Woocommerce.

Which lead to part 2.

I literally subtitled Relaunch on joining the enemy, […] and content changes and really—while I did blog, finally, I blogged—blogging with WordPress is the absolute worst for a person like me.

You see, WordPress is made for people that don’t know how to code. People, that like to have visuals, not people that think coding a What You See Is What You Get Editor (WYSISYG) is fun but would never actually want to use it.

Writing blog posts in WordPress took me days. Because I couldn’t write in that editor within WordPress.

I hate WYSISYG editors, I deactivated them and resolveld to writing Code. But the process was extremely cumbersome, since in the end, I manually had to upload each image.

I wrote a lot of articles in 2017/18 but I’d have to put aside an entire day to get one of these into a publishable format.

Truth is, the main purpose of the site had become the shop for my lettering resources and the main place to publish my thoughts had become Instagram captions.

But, I guess now is when we need to address algorithms.

Writing had become less frequent not only because it took so much time for me to blog, but also because I had a full-time job. I taught workshops, I did calligraphy events, I posted a lot on Instagram and the followers gathered in numbers I had never imagined.

The site was only accessed for the shop.

But then the algorithm of Instagram changed. The frustration with the plattform was all-encompassing and I didn’t get to see what my friends posted. Reels became a thing and the insane wave of TikTok changed the way Social Media functioned.

I don’t consume super fast-paced TikTok-style content. I don’t enjoy shortform. I still love to read blogs and I love to watch long-format videos on YouTube. (Give me 30min+ please!)

So, things need to change.

I don’t know what type of content I want to make on social media. I don’t know what type of content I want to make on my blog. But one thing I know.

I want to write on here again.

I know the only way I will write on my website, is if I enjoy it.

One good thing about growing older is that you get to know yourself. One thing I always knew was that to write, I need a blank page.

WordPress does not give me blank pages and blogging needs to happen in VSCode, or I won’t do it.

Blog posts in Markdown Files is really where my love for the web began.

Static Site Generators were my home for so many years, because they were a frontend coders dream because there is no backend. There wasn’t any JavaScript out of the box too, and as someone who took a while to fall in love with JavaScript, that brought me joy.

When moving the site to WordPress, I gave up the ultimate blog writing experience that is having a blog post composed of just frontmatter and Markdown.

I mean, look at it. Look at this marvel of an empty kinda page.

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---
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title: 'this is yaml for all meta information'
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subtitle: 'and you can design it completely how you want!'
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pubDate: 2024-02-13
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---
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### Some Content Heading, because, I love those
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#### Oh, look, another one
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Text. It's *just* text and so bloody __amazing__ and simple to add types of emphasis (which, I love too).
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I mean --> this is an Image! ![image description alt tags are baked in!](/src/img/and-then-the-path-just-like-this.png)
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I adore this.

With jekyll (the static site generator that was the start to my career, basically), I’d just write stuff like above in my editor and push to my server and that was it. That was a blog post.

And many, many, many months ago, I decided that I wanted that experience back.

It’s kinda funny, that I am once again, inspired by my job to choose my platform.

I still work as a Frontend Engineer (it’s been a decade since my first job in web, which is still insance some days) and writing in markdown is part of my job description.

At my job, I am responsible for authoring a Frontend Framework and Reusable Web Components that are used across the entire corporation. Being one of three Design System Engineers means I’m responsible for CSS and HTML structures used by dozens of developers. (Most of them with a passionate dislike for HTML and CSS.)

That means, big need for documentation. And wow, do I love to write docs. (0 sarcasm, for real, I will always be a writer first.)

In recent months we were in need of a new plattform because the docs were growing to a scope where they couldn’t just be housed in a Storybook.

And then we found Astro and, as we were building our site with it, and writing docs with it—I just bloody fell in love.

It feels like jekyll but on steroids. And in a world where everything moved to be so heavy on the JavaScript, I loved the way Astro put emphasis on the static aspect of what they were offering.

So, I ended up scrapping the mutiple attempts I had made since 2020 at a new website and got to work.

Let’s address the big elephant in the room, which was the main reason why I put publishing this site off for so many months.

Writing everything for the blog was fun, writing new layouts and styles and doing a logo redesign—that was so much fun.

But figuring out what to do with the shop was looming on the horizon and I tried a bunch of things. I implemented an entire solution with LemonSqueezy, which is quite a cool solution for digital products and quite easy to set up.

But LemonSqueezy doesn’t have a cart and the thought of migrating over 300 procreate brushes was killing me.

So, in the end, I decided to just bite the bullet and spend a day to code a new WordPress theme.

Once everything was settled style-wise it was alright for a Launch (and I’m sorry, I know, some dark mode stuff is ugly over there, blame WooCommerce… they seem to be changing CSS on that fucking cart in every version and love to put white backgrounds on everything.)

So, right now, you’ll see the shop link to shop.halfapx.com and everything shop-related is the same as it has always been, just under a different URL.

Maybe one day I’ll go ahead and give the entire Headless Stuff a try again, but not right now.

I felt like in the end, keeping the shop experience as it was and restoring the blogging experience to how it was before, was the best choice for my sanity.

I hope the slight change in website doesn’t affect your experience too much. But if it does, let me know what you struggle with most through the Contact page and I’ll try to fix it.

So, here we are. The end. I know that was a bit more technical for a “writing” article, but it is always very technically entwinded.

In terms of what the new site can do? It’s fast to update, it’s easy for me to add stuff in here.

You know, we can do math, and Code and Notes.

Quotes are super fast to do.

And you know, I can type math functions simpler than it is to explain that statement below trying to show you how the Simplicity of the new plugin takes basically zero effort and ease.

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### New Stuff
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So, here we are. [...]
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> Quotes are super fast to do.
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[you get the point]
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$$
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{Simplicity}_{\text{new}} = \lim_{x \to 0} \left( \frac{\text{effort}(x)}{\text{ease}(x)} \right) = 0
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$$
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<Note type="tip" title="ChatGPT was great for this">
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I did not come up with that Math myself. I just like LateX notation whenever I have to explain a formula.
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</Note>

You get the point, I’m excited about writing like this and I’m hoping to start writing a bit more again.