Launching the site

In 2017 I wanted to start taking art and my stories more seriously, with the ultimate goal of making and releasing my own games. With that I decided to make a new artist name for myself, that I felt actually fit me. I’ve had many different usernames before, most of which were randomly chosen at the time with maybe some vague idea behind them. I’ll go over those in a later post, when I write about and showcase some really old art. Anyway, I spent a bit of time making up a new name from elements that were significant to me, as well as a site mascot that could also serve as my profile/face online. The name I landed on was “Damirebly”. It is made up of, basically, 2-3 names I’ve had at some point, with the first part being a new name I wanted to officially take on (“Dami”). So bits of the past, and a bit of the future.

Happy with my choice of name, I set about making a website. I bought the domain in january of 2018, but didn’t do much with it until june that year. I made some assets (a logo and a favicon). I made a very basic page with just HTML and CSS, that had a few of my art pieces on it and links to my social media. I had an unfinished page for my art and writing that was not linked anywhere, so for any potential viewers of the site, the front page was all there was. After that I fell off any further development, and never added any more images, finished the other pages or fixed the layout.

I also didn’t draw much for a couple years, after having a few very productive months in 2018. I didn’t really pick back up where I left off until 2021, when I tried drawing weekly (didn’t work, but I drew more overall). All this time I often had the thought of fixing up the website, actually doing something with the domain, and trying to get back into drawing. It was one of my yearly goals for each year since 2018. It’s kind of daunting how you can procrastinate something so much it ends up taking years to get started.

In june of 2021 I was going back to school, and had been learning a bit of javascript in preparation. Also in preparation, I thought why not work on the website finally. I had barely logged into my hosting service all these years, and discovered that it had had an overhaul that removed most of the alternatives for website creation. Previously there were many options, like Joomla and Drupal, but now the only options were plain HTML/CSS like I had (and did not want to build a whole website like that) or WordPress. Which I also did not want to use. My plan was always that I would look into these other services to see which one fit me (I still don’t know much about them, maybe they all suck, but at least they were options), now I couldn’t.

I started looking into what alternatives I had for hosting and building a website, now that I could freely pick from anything, since I would need to change hosts anyway. I think I basically googled “static website framework” or something like that. I’m fairly certain this is the site I happened upon: Jamstack Top SSGs, back then. It’s an overwhelming amount of options, and I don’t quite remember why I picked Jekyll out of the bunch. I may have checked out a few and been intrigued by the close connection to GitHub Pages (which I ended up ultimately not using). Either way, I enjoyed learning and using the tool and decided to stick with it.

Development was a little on and off again, I was making progress building the ecosystem for my website, but not working on the design. Development stopped entirely when I began school, and it took another year before I picked it up again. In July 2022 I started by actually creating the design in Figma. I considered the color choices and how I wanted to display my art and posts. I previously tried to use a lot of purple and yellow in my design, and it ended up very dark and muddy. I still kept pops of these colors, but the website has a lot more white and lighter pastel purples now. The design did change a bit as I actually implemented it, with a major reason being that the design was so much bigger than I thought because I had been making it at 50% zoom all that time. So picking out font sizes or sizing elements to match the design made everything comically huge.

In November I really started making big strides toward getting the website to a finished enough state to redirect the domain to it. I didn’t want another year of not having completed this goal, and also not pay for a year of hosting with a service I wasn’t going to use. A lot of the functionality was done, and most of the remaining work was design-related. Another thing I did in November was create a new design to be the site mascot/my profile. I wasn’t entirely happy with the first one, even though I liked the design, I felt I could create something more intentional. I’ll write more about that in another post as it was its own little process.

Finally, we are here. This is kind of a soft launch for the website, as not everything is done content-wise (who knew that typing up a bunch of thoughtful descriptions for my own art and descriptive alt text would be tiring). And there may be further hurdles ahead. There is also more functionality I would like to implement down the line. But right now I’m very happy that the site is in the state it is, and look forward to adding more things to it on the other side of publishing it and being done with the previous website.

I have a few more blog posts I want to type up before the year ends, like as mentioned about the site mascot (re)design, and older usernames/art. I may also want to type up a more technical runthrough of how I made this website and the problems I ran into. As well as going more in-depth on the visual design choices I made. But otherwise for the rest of the year I want to focus on making more art, as I’ve put that to the side for a bit in november to focus on finishing the site. Next year a big project will be adding my old forum adventures to be read on the site. This will include writing all the text for them again, with maybe some annotations, as well as a new page design to view the images and read both kinds of text at once. This is another thing I’ve wanted to do for years.

Primarily what I want to do here is keep adding the new art I make (as well as some old art from time to time). Most of my blog posts will probably be updates on the site, and detail new additions or changes as I have a lot I can add over the coming months. I may also want to write some more general things, like about old art projects, things from school, or recommendations. Eventually I will try to realize my dream of making my own games, then those will get progress updates here as well. Anyway, welcome to my new website!

Correction 22.02.23: Year in the first paragraph changed to 2017, previously it said 2018. I realized after writing this that I actually came up with the name and initial mascot BEFORE buying the domain and working on the first version of the site, not all at the same time.