As a surprise to no one, I've never been much of a blogger. Hell, most of my social media is pretty dormant. I'm lucky if I post annually anymore. 2020 was deeply challenging, with some reflection and growth, like most people. One of the things that shook out is I really missed playing around on the internet for myself.

I don't know how or when it happened, but through the years as a digital product designer, I lost the perspective & saved some creative energy for myself. I would consistently fool around w/ some code pens or tinker with w/frameworks to learn reasonably regularly, but rarely put the effort or confidence to put that "finished enough" polish on anything to get it off, my local host.

This is the first step in a different and more consistent direction. In June 2022, I left the start-up I was with for the past 5 years and started working in a news organization, and now, designing daily for more editorial experiences has me inspired again lately.

I hope things are different this time because I focused on simplifying and optimizing my publishing experience. In the last three years, I fumbled my way into migrating my site to 11ty. It is excellent and works well with how my brain thinks the web should work (I still find mixing my javascript and css in react really gross and uncomfortable).

In this latest iteration, I really focused on publishing experience and workflow. It's much more of css garden-style refresh, where I experimented using css clamp, variable types, and blend modes. It is not perfect, but what's left is a humble beginning where I can focus on optimization and improvement.

I plan to resurrect a few of my old WordPress sites and migrate that content here.