The website has finally been updated! I will briefly explain what changed.
The most important stuff comes first: as of the 28th February 2021 the website has a new dark mode. It’s even out of beta! Well, at least I hope it is. While changing stuff in my stylesheets to get this dark mode working, I got to know why there are still so many websites out there that have a little “Beta” mark alongside of their dark mode toggle button. Even with my own tiny website that has maybe a dozen custom building blocks to create pages and posts, everytime I thought I was done rewriting rules I found another oddity after installing the built version… It surely takes some time to convert everything, especially if you do it unsystematically like me. 🙄
The dark mode is the new default mode. You can toggle it below in the footer. Apart from the dark mode toggle button you’ll find two other buttons there aswell. I figured it was time for a famous NSFW button. I plan to swear a lot here, so it may be beneficial for some having a button like that on the site. That being said I draw a line between being offensive, which is hurting people, and being macabre, which is blowing one’s fucking steam off. I don’t give a shit about SEO or stuff like that, so toggling is as simple as removing a class from the elements I want to reveal. It’s seamless and doesn’t require reloading the page. One could argue that doing it that way contentious content (not that I think that kind of stuff will ever reach this page in the foreseeable future anyway) is still being downloaded and that way could still be exposed to prying eyes but I think the site will never ever reach a point that would make designing a server-sided, cookie- or localeStorage-based solution a must.
Speaking of localeStorage, that’s exactly how those three nice buttons work. Essentially the buttons do not much else than removing and adding classes to the root (html) of the document, but in order for the website to remember your preferences between page loads the information must persist somewhere. Cookies were out of question since first I don’t like cookies, second I was way too fucking lazy to update my Privacy Policy just for a stupid cookie that saves information like this and third I don’t like cookies. So localeStorage it was. Even if the information gets deleted if you close and reopen your wrongly-set-up browser; since dark mode is the default your eyes will not melt when reopening the website:
The third button? Glad you asked. It was the easiest one to implement, since it does exactly one thing: nothing. At least it does nothing yet. I plan on changing some design elements to be a bit more funky, so for people that don’t like flashy stuff a button that can toggle between lavish visual effects is a nice thing to have.
Let me not forget to mention the new wolf head logo on the non-mobile version of the site. It even howls when you hover over it! Apart from that and other various minimal changes to the site, not much else changed. And so, the site is far from perfect. Although posts and pages get a Lighthouse score of roughly 85 on desktop and 70 on mobile, there is much more potential. This website is the first that I’ve ever created so it’s bound to have some issues. I know the font loading is absolute garbage, some of the website’s components are still running on some prehistoric jQuery dependencies and you don’t want see to the code structure in my workspace, oh no you don’t. I planned on doing various animated SVG elements for 404 and Nothing-found pages, a better Gallery block and a proper grid-based gallery page for nice photographs. Yes you read right, “planned”, past tense. I don’t think I will be able to ship these kind of changes on this website in the near future. You wouldn’t put time and energy in tuning a car that you know it isn’t build all too well in the first place. You are better off building a new and better car altogether. So that’s exactly what I am going to do. I plan on shipping a completely new website around summer next year. That’s a long time span indeed, but you have to understand that I am doing this in my, unfortunately currently very limited, spare time. Also, it’s not going to be your ordinary WordPress Blog either. I plan on upping my (tbh still very humble) portfolio with something very special, yes maybe even a completely unique website experience. I mean it! Stay tuned for an update regarding that!
To conclude, please don’t judge my writing in this post. I am writing this at 3 a.m. since this is obviously the only time I can be fucked to post anything at all. Anyway, thanks for reading and have a good one!
And yes I am going to post the other parts of the T110 3D project. Sometime. Maybe. Eventually.