In which I made this site
September 30, 2024
Well, okay, more like 'In which I made this layout'. I made my account about 6 days ago at the time of writing this, and actually uploaded my first layout on Sep. 25th... but I digress.
It's been a couple of years since I last properly touched front-end web development. I graduated as a New Media student in 2017, and then I didn't do anything with that until about 2021 when I did a couple freelance gigs. But even then, I used a website builder called Webflow - As an aside, it's probably my favourite modern visual designer - so its been a very long time since I've had to manually write anything!
Anyways, after I uploaded the layout I was originally using, I started to feel a bit limited with its layout and looks. One of my friends also reached out to me to help them get their site up and running before today so they had something to show for and post about on Cohost before it shut down and goes read-only by I assume tonight. So after putting that together, I became really inspired to design my current layout! And now here we are.
Sparing a lot of the obvious boring details, I guess I'll just recap some of the challenges and issues I had. Because thats the good stuff, right?
There actually wasn't too much in the way of designing the main layout and styling it. The problem came, as it always does, with the libraries I chose to use to enhance my site. The first came with CircleType, which is how I get that curved "logo" at the top of every page. I originally wanted this to be a link to the homepage since thats a natural way a lot of sites allow users to navigate to the index, but the way the library works is that it breaks everything apart into spans and re-renders it to the page. Oh well.
Then came the LeaderLines on the index page, which point to things when you hover over them. I actually didn't have a lot of trouble with these initially, but I found that sometimes they were pointing to old element locations. Turns out, this was because the page was sometimes updating after the LeaderLines rendered, causing a mismatch of where they thought the element was, and where the element actually was. Thankfully, this was a pretty easy fix by calling a method provided in the library to update the positions of the Start and End of every line.
Lastly... That damn marquee. It is a custom marquee that I cobbled together from a few resources. The main goal behind it was to get something that had smooth wrapping to create an infinite effect, unlike the normal marquee element. It took me at least 6 hours across two days of constant fighting, and trying out different methods and ideas people had online until I finally found something that worked. And damn does it look nice.
I think I will probably write up a resource blog in the near future on how I made it, and how you can replicate it. But that's for another day. For now, back to tweaking and making small updates to make sure this site isn't broken!
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