We’re live!

The last few months have been pretty hectic on the personal front so this project had to take a bit of a back seat. Unfortunately, a family member got really sick so we decided to move closer to help out where we can. There are still lots of boxes to unpack and little updates to make but we’re mostly settled—kinda like this website…

Last night, when I should have been winding down and getting ready for bed, I decided to pull the trigger and publish. To my surprise (and delight) muscle memory took over and in minutes I was up and running locally, pushing changes to main, and deploying to Netlify (my last commits were in late September).

I spent the quiet time between 10 and 1 tackling a few must-halves and fell down a rabbit hole of Jekyll’s collection items sort limitations.

Work included:

• Moving things to colederochie.com

• Setting up Google Analytics (Not sure I want to use long term but am familiar with it and haven’t assessed an alternative yet. I’m open to suggestions.)

• Updating copy

• Playing with font—on a whim I switched to Pangram Pangram Foundry’s Monument Extended for all headings. I feel like it adds a bit more personality than the previous Goudy Bookletter 1911 and definitely increases usability of links.

• Next/previous navigation for Work case studies. This is where I got tripped up—for the second time, apparently. Looking back at old tickets I realized I had came across this already and left a comment for myself…

A comment from past Cole in June 2020, which future Cole in Jan 2021 did not see.

Mah, well ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Like that issue, there are still so many things I want to explore and implement on here but for now it’s 100% “good enough”.

As the saying goes,

“if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

- Reid Hoffman, Co-founder of LinkedIn

Now I wouldn’t say I’m “embarassed” with the state of things here, but there are certainly typos, dead links, half-baked case studies, and that annoying navigation that I will absolutely solve at a later date.

If I take a quick look back at what my learning goals were for this project, I’m pleased to say I was able to hit them all. By no means am I an expert in any of the subjects I set out to tackle but I now have working knowledge and comfort with:

• Git/Github workflow

• Jekyll / Liquid

• Sass

• Flexbox

• Javascript

• Netlify

Unsurprisingly for 2020, this project took a lot longer to get live than I’d originally thought. That’s totally fine though. I now have my own little patch of the internet that I am in full control of. I am literally the “master of my domain”.

If at anytime I feel like experimenting or exploring something new, I now have the tools and access to get going.

I’m really excited to see how things evolve on here over the coming years and can’t wait to tackle things like:

• dark mode

• magnify images

• auto-generated reading times

• customer cursor

• loading animation(s)

• opengraph social images