Revamping my blog
I was supposed to be studying for my upcoming exams this morning, but instead of doing that I revamped my blog and added some add-ons to it. I have ADHD so I’m kind of used to all of this, but it doesn’t make it less exhausting. In part, I don’t regret the changes I’ve made, like I often do after such hyperfocus sessions, because most of them were necessary — just not that high of a priority for me right now to drop everything else for it.
There is this post I’m working on that has a lot of pictures and my CSS was not cut out for showing multiple images at once. At first, I didn’t want to mess with coding because I have no proper understanding of web development so I explored hosting just that one blog post (and possibly others with the same requirements) on Craft Docs but eventually decided against that. I used the add-on Image Gallery by Matt Birming. I actually adapted quite a bit from his theme because of how many nice things it adds to Bear Blog, but I wanted to keep my blog looking pretty much the same. Basically I wanted to maintain the general theme though with some tweaks.
I ended up modifying my theme with the respective add-ons, although not much needed to be changed because most of them integrated seamlessly into my theme so all I did was copy-paste in most cases. Here is a list of the add-ons I used:
- Upvote button
- Guestbook Styles
- Image Caption
- Avatar Title
- Image Gallery
- Announcement Bar
- Timeline
- Unlikely Button
Moreover, I added a guestbook instead of email and a microblogging timeline. The latter is something I’m still unsure of because Bear Blog is not made for this purpose. The whole thing looks gorgeous when accessing the site as a reader, but isn’t that straight forward on my end. I doubt I’ll use it a lot anyway because I usually post longer stuff than what fits into a microblog. It’s nice to have, nonetheless.
Overall, this is me starting a new chapter in my digital minimalism journey and distancing myself more and more from social media, even the new decentralized platforms. I have realized that the feedback loop stemming from likes, reposts and whatnot is an endless rabbit hole that siphons your energy with no end in sight. It’s so easy to fall back into it and so hard to lift oneself out of.