Why I made it?
In my head, this site was in the works since 2020, after seeing the blog by Tim Urban, Wait,
But Why which also inspired me to give it a 'quirky' name as opposed to "Daya's Blog". However,
I only found out it was because that was the name of his comic strip, and wasnt named arbitrarily. So in a
hilariousy ironic way, I do in fact have a uniquely named blog. Either way, here we are at.
When making this blog, I wanted to make sure I had no shortcuts; if something looked inefficient, I was going
to fix it (though I have recently learned of react.js which seems perfect for this blog but I am very unmotivated
to learn). The reason I made it was to keep score a record of all the stuff I do, as a form of portofolio
for my skillset. In general, I am in full acknowledgement that this site will hardly recieve any, if any at all,
traffic, but it's better to scream into a void than to be silent (despite almost all of my posts carrying less
emotional baggage than this deep metaphor suggests [what can I say, I'm poetic]).
The logo
The logo was tricky, because I lack the talent to make a logo. Originally, it was going to be a drawing of stickmen around the text, much like Tim Urban's blog. However, in this case, it was going to be moreso in the style of xkcd, with the title included to be drawn (perhaps with a little stickman chipping away at it with a pickaxe). Instead, I decided to go with the retro theme, as I wanted a colourful site overall a dark aesthetic, and neon fit the bill. As a result, I turned to Microsoft Word, and used the 'Harlow Solidd Italic' font. To get the design I wanted, I turned to the tutorial below and touched up the logo in photoshop:
The strings
In general, I wanted something cool to happen with the front page of the site; I wanted some form of interactivity. The way I did
this was through the neon strings that vibrated (if you're using mobile, or tablet they don't show) when you hover over the options
of the navbar. There were many ways I could have approached this, but I decided to record the strings vibrating in a desmos simulation
(kind thanks to whoever made them):
I tried to first use them as gifs (where I applied the transparency and colour adjustments) and then decided that webm video was
simply easier, but due to the adjustments, I had to convert the gifs as opposed to using the source videos. This means
that they are a tiny bit more choppy due to the compressed framerate. All I had to do was stack the video frames on top of each other
and use a bit of javascript to have them play.
AI
ChatGPT played a large role in this site. From a design standpoint, the site is all designed by me; unless I was missing a bit of knowledge, or needed grunt-work done, I coded the site myself; furthermore, to hone in the idea of this site's development being a learning experience, I, unless it was for testing purposes, never used any ChatGPT code I didn't understand. One thing it was very good at, was reapplying formatting to different divs in one section when adjusting another. E.G when changing the styling of the navbar options, I may have had to rearrange some details. I just fed in what was changed, and asked ChatGPT to extrapolate the same changes for the other colours.