I've Completely Refreshed My Website

My personal site has always been kind of this place on the web where I’d dump things here and there but it’s always been a very manual process. I’d play a game, eventually write the review, post it, and off it would go into the world. Which is fine for what it was but I started asking myself what could it look like if it were more live. More representative of what I’m actually doing throughout the day. I was also getting tired of seeing ye olde space theme so I’d been considering what a refresh would look like.

So like any good software engineer, before I could start on a new design, I needed a new side project that I ended up calling Lifesigns.

Lifesigns is just a simple docker container running a fairly simple set of python scripts. One listens for webhooks and the other produces a json blob of structured output. That’s pretty much it. It’s connected to several sources like my Steam account, my Calibre web instance, and enriches data from various sources. This allowed me to build out the very rudimentary first version that I added to my website with no real fanfare. I mean I talked about it on Mastodon a bit, but never announced it went live.

But it got me thinking. What if I made my whole site work around this concept. What would that look like? How can I push this even further than just a little section on my page.

So I got to cracking and went through several iterations of this over the last few weeks. I kind of went down several different thematic explorations, cyberpunk, technopunk, themes around music that I liked. I explored some synthwave/retrowave concepts and even considered tinkering around with things like WC3UI. But ultimately I landed with what you’re seeing today.

The home page is reminiscent of a video wall that you might see at an old electronic store or hacker den. You’ve got sections for what I’m reading, watching, listening to, or playing. All kept up to date by the underlying Lifesigns bit I created. When nothing is live, you are presented with the archive. My list of blog articles and game reviews with the latest few available for quick entry.

But it goes beyond that even, the site changes aesthetics slightly as the day progresses. It’s all based on my timezone but when you visit it during the morning or day, it’s a bit softer. There’s still the cyberpunk aesthetic going on, but it’s calmer. However, as it transitions into evening and into night, the site becomes grittier and takes on a bit of a cyberpunk techno anarchist vibe. Things are more vibrant, there’s more motion, it’s a bit more in your face about the design.

And that’s the concept. It’s alive when I’m alive, dormant when I’m dormant, shifting throughout the day. It’s the online version of what’s going on with me at any given moment.

What do I hope to get out of it? Not much really. It’s still my personal site so I don’t expect people to regularly pull it up and see what I’m up to, but it’s a living breathing site that will change each time you visit it without me having to manually do it. It’s my little slice of the web and it brings me joy so I hope, if nothing else, you look at it and say “that’s kinda neat” and if you never look again, that’s ok. Because I built it for me and anyone who stumbles upon it is pure bonus points.

I’ve got more ideas for it moving forward but for now, I’m going to let it breathe a bit and move on to other projects. This one soaked up a lot of my free time and I’ve got some other items I’ve been working on that I want to get back to.