New Website

Sat Jun 23, 2018 · 456 words

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With a new era of life comes a new website! The old pxlweavr website had served me well, but was growing antiquated in its look and lack of dynamic resizing or any mobile friendliness whatsoever. For this site I am now using Hugo, which is a fantastic static website generator, along with the Call me Sam. theme. I thought it would therefore be interesting to take a tour through my past websites.

Raw HTML

My oldest website I no longer even have archived. It was hosted on my parent’s server, and consisted of an extremely simple page without even any CSS. I don’t even recall what I put on there, except perhaps that I thought it was cool.

theCoffeeShop() (2008)

When I first got my own domain (thecoffeeshop.vndv.com), which was in 2008 or thereabouts, I was mostly hosting Java applets I wrote. The site was built statically using Dreamweaver and GIMP in a time when I thought Dreamweaver’s dropdown menu javascript templates were the coolest thing ever. I also thought theming the site after a coffee shop would be very clever, and for being 10 years old now, I think it still looks decent.

theCoffeeShop, Wordpess edition (2011)

Several years later, in 2011, I became familiar with the idea of a CMS. I thought Wordpress was the coolest thing ever, so I built a custom Wordpress theme and migrated to the CMS life. This iteration of the site lasted barely more than a year, as I recall, despite looking pretty nice. The logo was updated and the old overdone coffee theme discarded in favor of a coffee-inspired color palette.

pxlweavr (2013)

As time went on, “theCoffeeShop()” made less and less sense as a name. Nothing I was doing involved Java. I was doing iOS development and needed a home for apps I was making, and was starting in on various electronics projects. I was also approaching college application season and wanted an online portfolio of sorts. My interests all involved electronics and pixels, and I was “weaving” them together, after a fashion, and misspelling things for brands is cool, so pxlweavr was born. I returned back to a static website, but this time built everything from scratch with html, css, and some jQuery. It featured animations, automatic scrolling pictures, and fade-in popovers. I was quite proud of it. However, it was never very mobile friendly or kept very up to date.

pxlweavr 2.0 (2018)

And here we are today. The old site was geared towards being an online project portfolio, and as I move into graduate school, I need something more academically focused. It appears, in retrospect, that I am on a trajectory towards minimalism. Maybe the next site design will be a blank white page.