+ LozBlog

Let’s admit it y’all: LozBlog needed an update.

LzbFlt was good, I know I’m gonna miss it. Hell, I miss it already, as I there are things that this new theme I (already) am beginning to hate.

But such is life, it goes on. 

New content

I should probably elaborate on why I’m sticking to this new design. Well, it’s not just the look and feel per se, and I’ve been meaning to do a very clean, minimal theme (like this new one) for years, but it’s also the content, or rather, the new content. 

LozBlog has, until now, been mainly a written Blog, but as today, I’m adding some more stuff to serve more as a “playground”, as I never had one despite my many attempts buying domains, building a concept on paper, and never publishing them for real. 

(By playground I mean a place to show off more than just text posts, like experiments, photography, graphic design, interactive fiction, maybe games or apps, etc.)

What is this new content? It’s most visible on the homepage, I added a few sections describing… well, you know who’s LozBlog about. I’ll sum it up here:

• Life line: part bio written in cryptic concepts which should be only meaningful to me, part that “yearly accomplishments” page section I never finished, it attempts to display a yearly reminder of what life was in the year in question. Hopefully I can fill in the blanks, as I’m known for forgetting… (…) …things (sorry, forgot for a second there).
• Travel: a show off of places I’ve been to.
• Currently reading: books and stuff I mean to read/have read in current year.
• Pix: a photo/picture blog, which is just a category of current installation, featured on home and maybe other inner sections. I at some point registered other domains (ink of dreams, art and nation, et al), just for this Blog, but it never happened. So I’m integrating it here. Since I’m publishing not just photographs but digital designs or composites, I thought it would be better to call it “Pix” instead of “Photos”.

Structure

So as I said: I was eager to push this new theme not just for the graphic/UI design, but for the structure, which should be the foundation for follow up themes.

Once it’s properly finished, I may use the whole WP theme templating structure created for this theme, and probably just update the style sheet. At least that’s what I feel like today, with all the custom CSS I learned for this project.

Dracones? Really?

I don’t want to spoil the fun, so google it, the post title I mean. 

Now that you know what it means I can share the anecdote: I released the new theme (nicknamed “3 Clean White”, hinting that there may be a dark version), without really finish coding it, or adding all the sections/templates I want to have. I pushed it live with the “bare minimum”, and (at press time) it’s still lacking:

• working search
• (real) custom archives for
  • author
  • category
  • date year
  • date month
• custom page templates for
  • general archives
  • all categories page
  • sitemap
• proper cleaning on “theme customizer” and functions

And maybe a few more things.

One of those things is actually on home’s sidebar, on the “life line” section. By the time most people read it, it should probably be already fixed, but today it’s lacking: a loading animation of “my life”, as seen on a Youtuber’s shirt (I have forgotten his name Remembered! It’s Nas Daily, and below find a pic of his shirt, in case these link get broken someday). It’s part joke, part c’est la vie regarding death. ‘Cause it’s gotta happen, at some point, right?

When I was programming the theme, I decided it could wait, since I didn’t know how to technically achieve what was visually on my mind. So as I say, I put that part on hold and left a note for me to comeback later, and could only think of that line (hic sunt dracones), to remind me of it. It kind of stuck from an Amazon Prime series I was watching, “The Expanse” (totally recommended btw). I think it was Season 3.

I will surely finish it in the coming days, but it’s been too long since I wanted to activate it that today so I just hit that  god damned button.

Thanks for reading

Was this post too tech/geek for you? Sorry but what can I say? After all, I’m one of them nerds too.