Hello once again from the keyboard of Chris. It's been a minute since I've done a blog post and a lot has happened to cause the gap, I shall explain why in a bit. I hope everyone has been doing well, surviving the COVID pandemic and healthy sitting at home. I've been gone for a few months now, mostly due to depression, there is no lying about it and I'll be upfront.
Back in May around my birthday, I ended the two-year-long relationship with my partner Kyrie. More and more I was realizing that she wasn't the one for me, that we had such differences and we couldn't work past them, there were trust issues, jealousy and many more problems that ultimately lead to me making that decision that enough was enough. Since then I've been dealing with pretty crippling depression, I've had my good days and I've also had really bad ones but I've kept pushing myself through and doing the day to day life.
However, it also made me realize that now was the time to think about my future, my career, and what I really wanted in life. I haven't taken the step yet but come the spring semester I decided now was the time to go back to school and work on associates in computer sciences to help with opportunities that come up in programming or otherwise. I've also been taking more time away from the desk, both computer and hobby desk to get outdoors more and just enjoy nature, take some photos, and just enjoy some peace of mind. You can check out a lot of the pictures I've been taking over on the gallery page.
Astrophotography has also become a lot more involved in my life, finding the joys in that and considering the purchase of a really quality telescope to aid in that. And in general, been enjoying and catching up with my family who I neglected a lot during the two years I was with my partner. I've created some stronger bonds with my siblings and just learning and getting to know my family members a bit more as well, I mean we can't know all there is to know about them right? Sadly though one of the things I miss the most right now is playing of board games.... so if you're from the Elkhart Indiana area hit me up! Looking for some people to play games with. Onto the more serious side!
Website Development
So things also have been at quite the standstill on the website mostly because I'm waiting on assets from a graphic designer, new icons for the sidebar, and placeholder images during website loading. But feature-wise as an end-user the noticeable things would have to be the new sidebar menu, with its simplified looks and the new slide-out on hover, again waiting on icons to finish that up. I've also simplified pages, removing some that I just don't see getting used for the time being to focus on things I want to showcase. The services page was going to show and go into detail things that I provide as a service to customers, however, my ability to handle such things is at a premium right now and I wanted to instead focus on things that were already there, polishing them up and refining them. As you might have noticed as well we have an official logo, no longer is it an image of my face, but my brand identity. I will go more into details of it and who created everything in a later post when the final assets have been delivered and pushed live. So what are these refinements you might ask? Well first off I've renamed 'Articles' to 'My Blog' as the first felt too formal, and I want this to be a place I can just come and jot down thoughts, more informally. In doing so URL's broke, I could write a 301 redirect to go from the old to new but I really doubt much has been posted anywhere else in references so I wasn't worried. So if you had a link and its broken now my bad! In terms of the look/feel of them though nothing changed, although I want to, I'm just not sure how or what yet. I've also since filled in my 'About Me' page with things well, about me. Some personal details, some professional, bit of everything, you should go check it out! Of course, the page is markdown, because why wouldn't it be! Speaking of markdown, I also created my Uses page, modeled after Wes Bos who created somewhat of a standard for developers to be able to use to show off what software, technology, etc they use. I felt this was fun and decided to almost basically copy what Wes has, just changing to whats appropriate for me. Imitation is the best form of flattery as they say! The model's page got a bit of an overhaul, mainly being how URLs are handled again, this time being nested /models/model/:slug as how the blog posts were. I feel this fits a bit better. One final stop on this tour, the galleries page. Before if you'd visit the website you got nothing but a greeting to say it's coming soon. Well sure enough they appeared, they aren't done yet of course but the initial implementation is there. One can see the different galleries, and click into them and see the pictures. There are many meta details that need to be added, both to the picture and to the album. I haven't worked out how to link directly to an image to share yet either but its something of a start. I'd speak more but i think this post is getting lengthy enough. I've got some more in-depth material to cover soon on it, as well as the rebuild and cleanup that needs to happen, so for now I'd say happy coding and see ya'll later!