The new website, the PeerTube problem, the end of daily videos, 4gro and the side project album
11th July 2024
Hello people, it has been a year since I introduced the blog, however I have not made any posts, so you might be asking "why is that the case?", the simple answer is I'm just really lazy, I did make an attempt to publishing the follow up blog post a while ago, but I forgot about it and never published it, this post is a whole new post by the way.
The new website
As you might've noticed there is a new website design, I effectively scrapped Clygro Website V6 in favour of V7 (the design you are seeing right now), the reason why was actually because of an assignment for the course I'm doing at college, it was to make a website (combined with a digital portfolio project), this website is the result of that, it is mostly unmodified from the one used for the assignment, apart from some personal information being removed and the 88x31 buttons and the various tweaks I have done since. I'm really quite proud with the website, I think it really is a love letter to skeuomorphism and it is a good reflection of the fact that I really enjoy the design of 2000s/early 2010s hardware and software.
Design changes
There are also some changes that I did from the original idea for V7, one of them is that I originally intended for the brushed metal texture to actually be a leather texture, like some posh notebooks, however this was changed because I couldn't really find a suitable permissively licensed asset for it, however I did find the really nice brushed metal I used instead. Another change is the tabs, they were orignally pointy and colour coded with the idea of having a leather texture, however this didn't happen as the college computers did not have Inkscape (to make the tabs pointy) so I just gave that up.Changes for "V7.5"
I'm planning to do some more changes to the website, I'm either gonna call it V7.5 or V8 (likely V7.5) it won't be a complete redesign, however it will have the tabs more resemble the original design idea of being colour coded and pointy, also the current tabs already take up the entire width of the pane, so I do need to change the tabs to be smaller, which is what I plan on doing with V7.5. I also want to have the landing page be a bit more useful, I feel like the giant table should be relocated to somewhere like the projects page. I think I will have like some big buttons to the important pages and stuff too on the landing page. I do also want to fix the fact that the tab buttons don't actually function on some browsers (IE and Pale Noon iirc have this issue). That's all I really have planned for V7.5 which will be released at an unspecified time.
My presence on the fediverse
I have quite a large presence on fedi, I have my my Akkoma, I have my PeerTube, I have my Owncast, I have my mbin, however it is not quite that simple as of recently, the owner of the PeerTube I have been on for the past year has decided to push people away from the instance, seemingly due to costs, there is no way to contribute to funding to the instance, so effectively I'm homeless in terms of PeerTube, which is quite annoying as I want to properly start pushing PeerTube more than ever, I'm quite worried about moving instances as my videos currently total over 200GB of videos, so I can't really rapidly move, but also there is not many instances that offer to provide space. Just to make it clear, I'm willing to give a monthly donation to help fund the instance, but I have to find instances that allow me to pay using debit card instead of PayPal, which also does limit my options for instances, there is currently like 3 instances that I have my eye on moving to. Also I'm kinda scared to self host, as if something breaks (I'm not a server expert) than it would all be up to me to fix it, also I don't really have a server config to handle it right now (my VPS is like 300GB and my physical server has been sat out of service for over a year at this point).
The end of daily videos
To me this is old news, but I have stopped making daily videos at the end of February, I do not plan on going back to daily videos ever again, as they were very clearly prioritising quantity of quality, I have have been making longer higher quality videos since then and it has partially paid off with my first video getting over 100 views, my second with over 600, the third with over 300 and the fourth with 70 on YouTube which is definitely a higher average than when I was doing daily videos, the numbers are still a bit underwhelming though (especially 70 over the span of 2 weeks). I'm still in the process of recording a few more videos that will be released over the next few months.
Progress on 4gro + a side project album
I have slowly been making progress on 4gro (which I have 3 ideas for titles, one of them breaking the 3 letter rule, however is 3 words so it could just get abbrieviated), the lyrics and track listing have vaguely been planned, however I'm not very confident that the current tracklisting will be unmodified in the final release. I've not done really any recordings for a few weeks (with a few months before that) so I can't really give a real idea of the actual sound of the album.
The side project album
I have made a side project album, released under a different name, it is made exclusively of combining pre-cut beats, however when making it I did very much visualise a journey from some snowy mountains which I wish I could have appropiate visuals for it but it is very much not in my skills or capabilities unfortunately. The main reason it hasn't released is my laziness but also I keep on forgetting about the project, I started the side project back in late 2021 and only a few months ago I recorded their debut album. I try and follow up with a post when it releases.
Conclusion
Hopefully you enjoyed this post that is the first proper blog post, hopefully there will be much less of a wait next time. See you whenever.
