March 7, 2022
I went to bed nice and early last night. I was super exhausted. I had a pretty full day yesterday, although most of it involved sitting. After hanging out with Owen in the morning I went home for lunch before seeing Liquorice Pizza at the Fox with Myriam. I actually enjoyed it for the most part, although I felt it was too long. After that we got in an Uber and went straight to the Beaches Cinema to see ‘The Batman’. I was pretty bored with it, and felt that it was also too long. I don’t understand this thing of making every movie 3 hours long. We don’t need all that. If you’re gonna make your movie 3 hours long you’d better be a master of pacing, otherwise forget it.
So I woke up at 7 am but went back to sleep for 30 minutes. During that time I had such an interesting dream. I was able to fly but I wasn’t able to stay up in the air permanently. I think I had to keep coming down in order to run along the ground and regain momentum or something. There were also kids all over the place, and I think they kept trying to grab my arms and legs to pull me down. It felt like the stakes were pretty high, in a pleasantly anxious way.
After the dream was over I got up and went on a jog. It was very nice. There was a slight drizzle. I kinda like running in that sort of weather. As long as it’s not windy, then I’m usually good.
After the run I made coffee and did some reading. I really wanna finish this book. I’ve been reading it forever. There were a couple of weeks where I just smoked weed all the time and did no reading. I started the book over a month ago, I think.
I also did some thinking about my website. At this stage I’m really feeling like there’s a bit of blockage. I love the very first page, where all that's displayed is my name, my signature, and the years I’ve been alive. I also really love the pages that display the content. It’s the pages in between, and the process of getting to the content that doesn’t quite feel right. I had a couple of ideas that I’d like to try out today.
One of these has to do with the way each month is portrayed. I realized that it’s not in line with the way the very first page is shown. It’s also not in line with the second page, where the year is displayed at the top of the page, and below it are the 12 months. That’s all fine, more or less. It’s when you click on a specific month that it becomes inconsistent. As of now, you’re pulled downwards to where the month is displayed. The name of the month is then displayed at the top of the screen, and below it are square icons. As of now, if I’ve only uploaded one piece for that month, then what is displayed is a square icon corresponding to that piece, as well as 5 other boxes containing my signature. Earlier, all that was displayed was an icon for whatever content had been uploaded. I showed the website to Gabrielle, and in regards to the design of the page that displayed the whole year, she’d mentioned that she didn’t even mind how some of the months didn’t yet have an image and instead were occupied by a smile. So I decided to include a few of these smiles for the ‘months’ page. Now I realize that if I want to be consistent with how the entire year is displayed, I should do the same for the ‘months’ section, that is, if there are 31 days in a month, then I should have 31 boxes displayed. The ones that don’t yet have anything uploaded will simply have the smile displayed. This seems so obvious to me, now. It’s basically just a calendar. The only thing that I’m a little unsure of is days where I uploaded multiple pieces of content. I guess one solution would be that, for example, if you click on the 14th, and four pieces were made that day, you’d be directed to one page that houses all four pieces, instead of multiple pages for each piece. I don’t think I’ll be able to do that at the present time, due to the way dynamic pages work on Wix, but I can try. Another option would be that when you click on the 14th, you’re taken to a page that has the contents of that day arranged in a grid, sorta like a mini calendar just for that day. From this page you click on the particular piece of content you’d like to be expanded.
I don’t like the idea of having tons of pages within pages. I think the most beautiful way of following this approach would be similar to how iOS allows you to create a little folder on the home screen to house multiple, related apps. You just tap on the folder and it expands, revealing its contents. It doesn’t take you to a new page, it just expands.
I like the idea that everything feels as though it’s on the same page, just very very tiny, and the process of clicking just expands and shrinks things, as opposed to this idea that everything is stored in different sections, sorta like a library. I prefer the feeling of using a microscope, in that it allows you to zoom in and out.
This brings me back to another aspect of the website which is hopefully an easy fix. It has to do with the animation that happens when you click on a month. As of now, when you click on say, ‘January’, the page quickly scrolls downwards to wear January is displayed on the page. I don’t like the idea that everything is organized top down. It’s a subtle thing, but if possible, I’d like to keep the ‘direction’ as consistent as possible. As I said, if I had to go with just one direction, it would be this feeling of going ‘in’ and ‘out’, as opposed to left and right, up and down.
I want to also write down a sort of brief for the website. I’d like to write down clearly what the goal is, what factors are assigned most importance, stuff like that. Those are things that steer me. Once I have those key things determined, it starts to almost feel like the website is designing itself.