In which I describe the two most recent incarnations of this website, why I’ve redesigned it again, and what my plans are for this “Project 52” thing.

Read with: Hot Club de Paris – Hey Housebrick [Spotify, YouTube].

A couple of months ago, in an effort of public self-motivation to rejig this website, I took part in SiteSprint. My plan was to make sneeu.com look a little more retro, while including photos from my Flickr stream, and posts from Twitter.

As you might expect, the end of SiteSprint neared, and I, having done very little work on the website other than tinkering with TypeKit, ended up stripping back my grand plan: I did as little as possible to show that I’d participated. The result was a rushed design that was a shadow of my grand plan: certainly not the image that I wanted to purvey to my visitors.

Then Project 52 (P52) came along. The goal of participating in P52 is to create fresh content each week. I’m planning for laziness: not all of my posts will be well written, multi-drafted, several-hundred word essays, but I do plan to post something every week. Perhaps that post will be a discussion of a code snippet, a photo I’m particularly proud of, or even a well written, multi-drafted, several-hundred word essay: I require a design that can cope with those types of content.

I also need something readable. To me that means distraction-free, black(ish)-on-white design, and serif type-faces: something I had already attempted by marking-up a couple of George Orwell essays. Using my Orwell pages as a base, I applied it to the grid I set up in a previous sneeu.com incarnation, and had somewhere I could start from. A few days of tweaking, tinkering, adding code styles (from GitHub), checking my additional apps all worked with the new styles, and it was ready to go.

For now, I’m happy with what I have now: a realigned version of the minimal sneeu.com, which hopefully has enough scope, and little enough code that I can extend it to fit my needs over the next year.

And I can now relax for another week, knowing that I’ve done my P52 post!