Monday, we meet again. Oddly enough I don’t dread Mondays. I enjoy my work, so the Garfield meme has no power here.
As discussed on the shiny brand-new episode of Pixels and Puppets podcast, I’m in the process of setting up a new Linux server to use as a development environment. One of the several things that will be developed on it is a new theme for this very site.
The existing theme and site are, uh, fine? I guess? It does what it’s supposed to, but I know it could be better. Plus, it’s built on top of some older work and there’s a fair amount of cruft built up, and it’s at the stage now where it’s better to just wipe the slate clean and start again. A lot of the CSS framework is really outdated, and it could benefit from more modern techniques.
The site wasn’t a huge priority for me until recently, as it hardly got any traffic. Most of my external contacts and outreach were on social media sites and Etsy, and we all know how that went. As I’ve moved away from corporate platforms and on to things like Mastodon, this blog, and opened the Direct Shop, this site is not only more important but also getting more views. Time for a bit of house-cleaning.
Then there’s the problem of web hosting. At the moment it’s on a shared hosting plan that is, to not put too fine a point on it, un-good. Thanks to some fairly aggressive caching I’ve managed to make it mostly usable on the front-end, but y’all have no idea what it’s like on the back-end. It’s 90’s modem slow when having to do anything with the database, and actually gets in the way when I’m having to manage products on the direct shop. The hosting is also not equipped to handle large amounts of hi-res images, which let’s face it, I need.
I will eventually be moving to more robust hosting but that’s an exponential jump in expenses so it’ll need to wait for a bit, but in the meantime I can help matters by making a cleaner, lighter theme. And being an old CSS wizard that’s well within my skillset.
No timeline on it yet, just another plate to spin, but it’s on the radar. Also on the radar: coffee.