I want this page to serve as a spec for the site. I decided to write this a posteriori, but I’ve wanted to build a personal site for a long time. I had made a couple of attempts in the past, but the form that they had taken was closer to that of a portfolio. This time, I think I have something that is truly personalized. So, I’d like for this page to act as a north star for how I want to interact with it.
Back in 2020, when COVID first hit, I got on Twitter for the first time, and I thoroughly enjoyed being on the platform. I had just started to learn how to code, and often, I’d tweet out whatever I had learnt that day. Occassionally, I would try my hand at expressing some of my thoughts and ideas. This was a whimsical act, and it never overwhelmed me as it always felt like I was writing into obscurity.
Over time, my relation with words changed. Your thoughts and ideas carry weight. There are plenty of examples for this.
- The music that the people in a region listen to influences the way they talk, dress, and act.
- A coach advising their player, who’s high off of the rhythm of the match, during an interval, has to be choice with their words so as to make them privy to repetitive patterns or unnoticed openings.
- The connotations of names you assign to variables and functions in your computer programs, guide you and your collaborators down specifc lines of thought.
This was something that never concerned me before, but I began to notice how often I got swayed by the ideas of others. And I’m oblivious to some of the things I’ve said that have had a lasting impact on others. This paralyzed me. What had once felt gratifying, now made me nervous. Expressing something that seems trivial to me could affect others negatively. Since then, I’ve been struggling to put myself forward online. But being online is still a huge part of my life, and now, left without creative devices, I just consume what others have to say.
Not being able to adapt to this is an error on my part, but as a result, I began to lose out on the fun aspects of writing online. Expressing half fleshed-out thoughts and following them till they’re actually coherent, stumbling upon interesting ideas, being able to share our ideas with others and spark discourse.
At the end of the day, most of us live on borrowed ideals. But, I think there is still some merit in this act of expressing and exploring ideas. Just as how ideas influence those around you, your own thoughts affect you; the way you view yourself, the way you react to situations, and so on. Planting ideas, detailing them, changing their shape in the appearance of new information, these are all characterestics that I deem important in most walks of life. It’s also a sign of robustness. When you stop letting thoughts and ideas flow through you, you begin to atrophy. And I’d love to continue practicing it, because I’m aware of how fun it could be.
I wanted to create a place that felt welcoming to me, a place that I would revisit often. This piece of writing on why creatives should have a personal site (I highly recommend giving it a read if you’re considering making one) encouraged me to think of a visualization of my site that inspires me to work on it regularly. It didn’t take long for me to settle on one; a tree in my corner of the internet.
The data structure that Sapphire, my site generator, deals with and eventually emits, is a tree. Metaphorically as well, a tree made sense to me. I’d like for my tree to have all sorts of branches. Thick strong ones, short brittle ones, weird curly ones. And I’d love for these branches to shoot off of existing ones. But, to grow such a tree, I need to lay a strong foundation, and that’s what I aim to do with this page. I primarily am building this site to help me think better. And in order to do so, I need to maintain a sustainable and symbiotic relation with it. I need to breathe life into it just as it breathes life into me. To me, that means that the interface, the navigation, the colors, the font, and particularly how information is structured, should feel peculiar to me and the way I’d like to think. I’ve tried to be more deliberate about this and I hope that the effort makes it easier to feed it with ideas.
Another thing that bothered me when I decided to make this site was, “What if a half-baked idea that I had leads to a lot of people flocking here?” (I know, I know, how presumptuous, humour me for a second). But, writing online is a spectrum.
I think I’ve put in a non-negligible amount of effort into personalizing this space, and a strong reason for it is that I don’t want to commoditize myself. I think I’m mainly writing for myself and close ones. As such, I hope that my friends, and strangers that stumble upon this tree, can rest under its shade together with me. Hopefully, they find some branches worth observing or playing with. The icing on the cake would be if they decide to plant their own trees too, and I get to rest under their shade and marvel at their branches.
If you’d like to know more about where I got the name from, or my design decisions the interface, continue reading!
Acknowledgements
But, before that, I’d like to express my gratitude to a couple of folks who inspired me to build up momentum and actually push the site out into the open:
- Judah, his services, and advice on what makes a personal site, was very helpful. He provided direction and a lot of fodder for me to think more deeply about what this site means to me.
- Geekodour. It’s always fun to visit his website. There’s so much that you could do there, yet it feels enjoyable instead of overwhelming when you’re lost on a page.
Why the name Vaxitas?
It’s just a moniker that I’ve used since I was a kid. I think I used it in almost every MMORPG I played at the time: Fiesta, Adventure Quest Worlds, and Runescape. When I was about 11 or 12, I had come across the Kingdom Hearts series. My mom wouldn’t budge when I begged her to buy me a console. In fact, it was the reason why she pushed me to pick up a sport. So, I used to watch playthrough videos on YouTube. There was this character called Vanitas, whose design I found really cool. I decided that I wanted to use his name for my online persona. To make it sound more badass, I (somewhat) used KH’s naming convention for the Nobodies, by inserting an X in the middle.
I think it just feels comforting to use a pen name for my writings, and it helps me think of the site as a strongly related, yet separate entity.
The Interface
I’ve mentioned before on this page that I’m really proud of the interface. I think it enhances the way I’ve decided to structure my ideas. The primary navigation shows you a bunch of general pages / ideas. If these ideas branch out into more veins, they show up in the secondary navigation. I could also make the interface of the secondary nav unique to the category of ideas it falls under. These off-shoot ideas can also have their own veins if they want to! I always felt that the documentation style layout was really handy for both the writer and reader. There were a couple of concrete examples that I referenced, so that I could extend this design and truly make it my own:
I also love the colour scheme. Before I even picked out the colours, I knew I wanted to keep the colour palette as simple as possible. Colours aren’t something I’ve played with a lot before, and I didn’t want to feel fatigued when making decisions around this. My friend helped me make a moodboard of colour palettes that they found on Pinterest. I picked 2 of them, one for my light theme, and one for my dark.
I personally find my light theme very pleasant to look at. For some reason, it reminds me of having ice cream at Milano (BLR)! I think my dark theme’s alright as well, and I have it in case my eyes feel a bit irritated and I want to switch it up once in a while.
While looking for fonts, I knew that I was going for something that made me feel like I was writing in a notebook. I just happened to chance upon this when I opened up Google Fonts, so I went with it.
I want this site to be durable. The UI isn’t something I intend to revamp frequently. In fact, I hope that I can stick with this for a few years at least. A core tenet of a website that is designed to last is that text is a universal interface. A website that can withstand the test of time, doesn’t send a lot of overhead along with the text when someone vists it. I found some of the rules in the manifesto too restrictive to abide by. But, this was a philosophy I tried my best to adopt; use text as your primary interface.
At some junctures during development, I found it a bit difficult to stick to this rule. I spend most of my time working on web applications, so my immediate solution for any supplemtary content on a page that could break the layout is to wrap it in a dropdown or a modal that renders conditionally. This means that the text wouldn’t be served immediately and it would only be rendered when the pop-up is open. The consequence is that text wouldn’t be a first-class citizen on my site. I’m proud that I made an active effort to fight that instinct.
Sapphire and Svelte forms most of the scaffolding of my site. This ensures that I can think of the text, the rendering of the text, and the relation between pages, as separate concerns. The intermediate output that is used to render the pages, the schema, creates a hierarachical structure of my pages, that is shown in the navigation. The final output that is produced is the necessary CSS, JS, and the HTML files for each page. This gives me the confidence that I can change the appearance of my site fairly easily, because it would only require me to swap out one rendering template for another, without having to disturb the other independent parts of the process.