Home is where the start is
The new site homepage is now live!
It takes a few cues from the old version, but introduces a new aesthetic that I have carried over to the rest of the site. I may do more once things are settled and I've ensured there are no glitches.
I was struggling to find a screenshot of the previous homepage (before I switched to going straight to the blog) so had to grab one from an old video. It's not the absolute latest — it doesn't have the title and bottom bars — but the actual content is much the same:
The link block had hover/focus effects so that each icon would morph and grow as you hovered over/focused on each section. Adding a short vibration (when on a device that supports it) made me liken it to a fidget toy.
The goal was to was to do something different, a new approach, so I asked ChatGPT for some ideas:
With what you know about how my blog looks and works, what do you think I could do to really switch things up with the look, feel, and functionality. I suppose I'm a bit bored with it and want something out of left field.
A couple of suggestions were "a time machine" and "a thought map" but the one that really caught my eye was to "make the site feel like a signal receiver". The description may have been a bit elaborate, but I liked the sound of it: the blog starts to feel like a system with memory, not just a chronology.
I took this suggestion and started switching things around; a blog post is a transmission, On This Day becomes Echoes, similar posts have Resonance, and random posts are Anomalies. Untitled posts are currently being referred to as fragments, even if they are long, so I might have to rethink that at some point.
The Header on the old page said 'Welcome' but that didn't fit. GPT suggested a few things that I didn't like so, after a bit of thought, I settled on 'Signal Lock'.
I put all this information into Codex and asked it to draft a new layout with each of these elements as individual modules. I liked what it initially came back with, but it needed more, which is where the inspiration from the old page came in.
Introducing the new homepage (click to expand):
The list of links is now a module called 'Gateway' and has the same hover effect. This also extends to the main icons for each module, although the side module icons just grow.
Echoes includes a list of years with posts 'On This Day' — this is based on the post being shown and if the latest posts is not from 'today' there will also be a link to 'Today's echoes'.
Resonance uses a simple word frequency check to find 'similar' posts. It's very basic but offers a means of discovery for items that was never there before. I don't use labels as much as I should so that doesn't work as well as it should.
Now that Gateway has the links, I needed to replace the block in the header that pointed to /about, /hello and the RSS feed. In keeping with the new aesthetic, I thought it would be fun to have a haiku:
Thoughts, fragments, signals
The home of Colin Walker.
Written and sonic.
I wanted to draw more attention to my music so indicating the signals are both written and sonic seemed like the way to go. I need to get going on the new randomelements site so anything I can do in the meantime will help. I've also been contemplating a module to include an embed of my latest release on Bandcamp. That's for another day.
When logged in, if there are any draft posts, a final module will appear to show these:
This will make it a lot easier to keep track of things as I neglected my old Drafts page.
The new homepage has meant I needed to tweak the existing site theme to better fit. The title and bottom bars now just have borders instead of a gradient background (solid on smaller screens) and icons have been recoloured and moved where appropriate. The rest, however, is largely the same.
A small amount of the terminology has also filtered through and I may make more changes as I get a better feel for how it all fits together.
People may complain about AI but it has enabled me to get this all done in the space of a couple of days whereas I would probably be working on it for a week or more. Codex has enabled me to offload a lot of the 'grunt work' to focus on the finer details.