BrianFeeney.us v10

Whoops. Designed and rebuilt my site, again. Version 9 has been up for about a week and I've already updated it. Why?

The design of v10 was one of the many in the running for v9, but because it involved more complexity and refinement, I put it off. My first order of business had been getting the new Craft 3 CMS installed and online. To do that quickly, I had chosen a simpler design.

The design of v9 was fine, but it wasn't enough. It lacked character. With this iteration, I've tried to make something that walks further down the road of a single concept. The idea was to take elements from technical manuals and printing samples and apply them to a web page. Probably not the first to do this, but it feels fresh to me.

I still feel like the best way to read my site is actually not via the site itself, but with RSS. And so I've allowed a couple things to obstruct the experience a bit. The dotted lines marking "the fold" and the 50% scroll depth will occasionally overlap with text. The randomized duotone color on the writing and quotes pages sometimes have non-ideal contrast for great reading. I like something about this. A little bit of contained chaos.

I've still prioritized the photoblog over all other content. Perhaps someday soon, I'll change the index to better balance the types of stuff I have on the site. I want to make an about page, but am considering making that the homepage, instead. Not sure, yet.

I'm really proud of this one. One of my favorite bits is the metadata I'm sharing about the page: browser window hight, page height, page load speed, character count. I'm looking to find a couple more measurable things that I can add. Page size, is one, but I'm not yet sure I can accurately pull that using jquery.

There is one new thing in v10: photo collections. I've made a few groupings of photos I've posted along a theme, place, or time. There are over 700 photos in the entire gallery. Not every one will belong to a collection, and some might end up in a few. I want to start considering the work I've done to date and to see what makes a photo I've taken a Brian Feeney photograph. Making these collections would help.

I still plan to rebuild this site with vue.js. I'd love to make page transitions smoother, and to animate some sections in creative ways. This will probably be a winter project, once we're all trapped indoors again.