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 ala 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!