falling down & not getting back up
hey! did you notice the new blog layout? i hope you like it!
a big portion of my tween years was spent coding my own website1 and redux edits for tumblr, so html/css is something i do have some experience with. my previous layout was built off of one of the preexisting ones that i thought i'd tweak to my liking. however, after taking enough inspiration from other blogs and neocities sites i decided i wanted to change my layout again. i drew up some wireframes, chose a preexisting theme i felt i could mold to fit my vision, then got to work. except nothing really came out of that.
i couldn't understand how the code worked. there was a bunch of css properties i had never used before, and having multiple w3schools and stack overflow tabs open was not helping. even though i kind of got the fundamentals of what the property was meant to do, it was interacting with other parts of the code in ways i couldn't fully grasp. every time i thought i had figured it out, i'd refresh just to see my blog totally messed up.
for a second i considered coding my layout from scratch because then at least i'd know the framework like the back of my hand. although honestly, i was kind of too lazy to do it from scratch. doing it that way would take a lot more effort than editing a code that was already pretty close to what i wanted. and if i couldn't even successfully edit a code right now, how was coding from scratch going to be any better?
this was originally supposed to be an update on the new blog layout and what i envisioned for it—a left-hand sidebar, day/night mode, responsive dimensions—and how i achieved it. part of me was being stubborn. i thought back to my tween years and how i probably would've been able to figure it out. i'm a different person now though and i haven't seriously coded since then either. so after a week of attempts, i gave up.
why is giving up so frowned upon, anyway? i guess a lot of it has to do with the act of giving up being so strongly associated with this sort of defeatist attitude; like you weren't strong enough to brave hardship. while that is definitely true sometimes2, i think life is too short to keep doing something that no longer makes you happy because you feel obligated to a la sunk cost fallacy. too much persevering might even be holding you back from moving on to other things. better things. sometimes giving up is taking care of yourself. and i do not think giving up has to be forever either. i think you can quit for now and come back later too. sometimes it helps to approach a difficult task after you've changed. there is a lot of nuance to this topic of course, but i think you get the point i'm trying to make.
after all this contemplation, i saw the mcluhan lite theme by mgx.me trending on bear. it was pretty much everything i was looking for, so all i had to do was change the colors and typeface. i'm really happy with how it looks. let me know what you guys think!
until next time!