Hey there. Hope you've been well. Happy 2024. It's been another year of list-making. Let's recap:
We've got two new sections this year: Bread and Running. I'm really quite proud of those two. I'm making a little vow this year to share more of what I make in the future rather than what I consume.
Everything isn't on one page this year. There's a little navigation at the top of the screen to help you move around the different data sets.
I focused less on the 'design' portion and more on the 'web' portion of this, this year. There's a pretty extensive "extras" section if you continue down this page. I explain how I track and build this website.
If you have any questions or want to chat about anything on here, I'd love to talk & help you build your own site. Send me an email: billygartrell@gmail.com.
All right. That's it for now. See you on the other end and have a good year!
Okay, hello. Welcome to ~the extras~. It's a little funny to spend hours and hours on this project to come to the realization that this is the part that I'm most excited about. There's a lot that I thought about while building this that I want to share. Follow me to the nerd zone.
I didn't include 'games' this year because I only finished one and that was Destiny's Lightfall expansion. But, there's a story here: My friend Ryan (belovedly nicknamed Deubie) from highschool contacted me out of the blue one day telling me that one of our old friends from middle school unexpectadly passed away. I had not spoken to Deubie in years and we had both not spoken to our other friend in even longer. This sad circumstance lead to Ryan and I talking frequently. We started to play games like we did after school days. He bought me a copy of Lightfall to play together. So we did. It was nice.
I played a few other games as well that I really loved, but I'll get you some full thoughts when I finally finish them.
I just wanted to take a moment to be transparent and explain how I did a few things with the website in an attempt to show how you can make your own if you have any interest in doing something like this on the web.
I get a lot of help from the templating toolkit, Bootstrap. Basically, you can build a basic HTML page and then use their styles to make it look nice and clean. You link to Bootstrap and then get access to their stuff. It's super helpful and saves a lot of time for all of the little details of a site. I use it to help out with spacing and for setting up mobile responsiveness.
This year I decided to try to incorporate a light templating language to make building the pages a little faster. There's a lot of data to copy and paste from my spreadsheets and notes and I was trying to see if there was anything I could do to speed that process up. Last year, I just used raw HTML. Every line of data was hand copied, replaced, and updated. So here comes Handlebars. Handlebars allows you to make templates in a pretty easy way without having to have a database of any kind. So basically, I could turn a big list of text data into the tables you see on the site. I build the HTML and CSS for the template once, and then can populate it with all of my text data. Pretty cool. Did it actually save me time? I don't really think so, but it certainly makes for cleaner code. If I can figure out how to format my text data quicker, then it might be able to really help me. We'll see.
Okay, listen: I'm trying not to be a crotchety old man with new technology. Despite there being many things I dislike about AI, I try to use it every few months to see if it can actually help my life in a meaningful way. I tried to use AI to help me with the manual "copy and paste" parts of this site. Like the whole templating thing I just mentioned above: I tried to take my raw data, give it to AI, and have it spit out what I needed for Handlebars formatting. It showed promise for a moment. It understood and made assumptions about my template that I didn't expect and it was able to regurgitate the data accurately. Until it didn't. All of a sudden, it would break, forget a rule I told it to follow, randomly start making up comments for things I didn't write. It was another tool that, in the end, I feel like didn't actually save me any time. Disappointing. For now, still not for me. I was using the free version of ChatGPT, btw.
Okay, so there are definitely simpler ways to get a website online but these are the services that work for me.
I use the incredibly popular Github to store and manage my code. Then I use Netlify to compile all of that code and put it online at my distinct little place on the internet. Basically, it points the code to my domain name which I purchased using Namecheap like a decade ago.
I think that's it. If you have any questions, please send me a message. I'd love to help you get your site up and running too. Let's live in our little internet gardens together.
Why did I even start doing this? If I remember correctly, it was loosely inspired by the YouTuber, essayist, video-game-guy, Tim Rogers. He makes incredibly thorough and detailed video essays about video games. In these videos he will play full games to completion numerous times, tracking data the whole time, explain the data, and then come to conclusions about the game design. They're really cool and I felt like I might really be able to learn something if I try to be more thorough with my life. So at the start of the new year of 2022, I thought I'd collect some data on myself to see what I could get to. Andddd here we are. I just wanted to see what paying attention might teach me about myself.
This year, I've really felt excited to discover the interconnectedness of art. I told a similar story on a different page, but I read a book that I really liked, did some research, found a director inspired by the author's work, watched ones of his movies, did some more research, found another contemporary director who was inspired by that director, etc. It's a neverending web of inspiration and I think that's kind of amazing. So, I wanted to shed some light on what inspired me while working on this.
Okay, so my design is relatively similar to last year's. It takes forever to do this stuff and I don't have the interest this year to re-invent the wheel. So visually, here's what I was working with when I made my cards and layouts last year:
In the group above we have work from:
The website is largely inspired by the Brutalist Web Design / Minimal trend that's been going on for a while now. I will reference Minimal Gallery from time to time and definitely feel as though the work there has rubbed off on mine. It's a great collection. Check it out.
I keep a running note on my phone to track all of this stuff. In 2022, it was one super-long note. This year I broke the categories out into their own notes.
If I do something during the day, I usually write it down later in the day; maybe before bed, while eating dinner, or (honestly) sitting on the toilet. Whatever. Essentially any time I might scroll social media, I'll go to the list instead.
At the end of the year, I move all of the data over to Google Sheets and then I begin working it into the website. This process takes me DAYS. I need to find a better way to keep up with it over the year as to not spend so much time at the end.
See ya :)