Jeremy Staffeld

Category: Uncategorized

  • Why My Site Is So Lame

    “My site is shit because I am not getting paid for it.” – Random webdev on Reddit.

    Why is my website so obnoxiously minimalist?

    Well, the random developer’s quote above made me push several puffs of air through my nose in a snicker because he was spot on. I think you will find that web developers may spend some bit of time on their career portfolio websites (even those are barely worth the effort) but why go nuts on something that you aren’t getting paid for?

    For me, well… I am and have always been a minimalist when it comes to my tastes. Rarely does this come out when building for clients though… except for one opportunity to build a site for one of the Emmy Award winning producers of To Catch A Predator (notice I am not so minimalist enough to humble-brag?). He wanted a simple black and white site in WordPress so that he could edit it himself, and really… it suited his style. If you knew me in person, this style is just obvious.

    I study the trends and follow them because who am I to deny a client what works in the “now”? For a short time I even taught a class on User eXperience (UX) design and what to track and design for in User Interfaces (UI). But that is all marketing. That is all to sell something… maybe not at first, but eventually. It’s fascinating stuff, to be honest. I pursued that type of information and wanted to apply everything I learned wherever it made sense.

    But this site… I don’t even know what this site even is. I do know that it isn’t selling anything to anyone and it never will. It’s just a place for me to journal and try out coding projects… at least for now. Who knows… maybe I’ll fumble my way to creating THE hit new mobile app and nobody will ever read this because this site is now an ad for ____.

    Right now I just want to break all the rules and play…

    I want to play around like I did as a teenager discovering Microsoft FrontPage for the very first time and believing my own little Geocities site will be seen by the entirety of the world… even though I had nothing to say and sure had a ton of those animated “under construction” gifs.

    I miss skipping class in college to build weird websites with no purpose other than the art of the thing. To be fair, if I spent that time building websites with a purpose I would have sooooo many more zeros attached to my paycheck by now. But, whatever… I miss the fun of doing what feels good and has somehow been lost in today’s internet world.

    I just want to play.

  • Primum

    “No, this is not the beginning of a new chapter in my life; this is the beginning of a new book! That first book is already closed, ended, and tossed into the seas; this new book is newly opened, has just begun! Look, it is the first page! And it is a beautiful one!” – C. JoyBell C.

    It’s been a while since I built a website for myself. Since 2016, I have been chasing other pursuits, and while I have built the odd website for others, I have mostly just been out of the game.

    So what am I doing here now? Well… I don’t know yet?

    I want this place to be a creative playground for myself, and very likely just to myself. My initial goal was just a server to make private apps to aid my work life.

    Oh lord, why a website then? Can’t I keep a journal and keep my saved projects on my hard drive? Sure. But maybe someday I’ll let others peek behind the curtain and see what a mess I have made of myself and whatever it is this thing (gestures broadly) might become.

    I’ll tell you that I’ve missed this. My god, have I devoted so much of my life to arranging invisible boxes via HTML and CSS, while pounding my head over Javascript and PHP… though I did have a lot of fun making games, and maps, and apps in the pursuit of learning such things.

    I guess that what I have missed most was the creativity of it all. As I have grown old and grizzled, my day-to-day work life has become more mundane than creative. To be honest, the days just blur together… and I’ve said that for years now… so let’s be fair, the years are now starting to blur together.

    I miss just putting shit out there! Even if nobody would ever care to see it.

    So let’s see what a new website shall bring, shall we? And since I haven’t made any of this public yet, by “we” I mean me and my demons.

    Cheers to a new book from a long story.

  • Not much to say…

    I have the day off so I plan to fix a flat on the back tire of my E-bike — no small task since E-bikes have an electric system powering a rear hub motor. After that, I may hold off on grocery shopping since funds are low. While I successfully demanded a raise and received it last pay period, I fear that I was a little too liberal in paying off bills in one fell swoop. The good news is that the entirety of my next check can be saved and used for fun, as all bills are covered. The bad news is that next check is over a week away. God, journal entries have become boring now that I am old!

    Outside of myself and my cozy little absorption of work, eat, work, eat, fuck, eat, work, etc. the world, at least the United States, is becoming scary. Trump, Musk, and the sycophantic GOP are going full bore with the tech-bro style “move fast and break stuff” governance. Part of me smiles at this because they are proving all my protests and warnings to be true. But people are getting hurt.

    Our nation has already lost so much respect and confidence from the rest of the world and this only the beginning. I’m scared. I’m disgusted. I am sort of silent protesting by wearing T-shirts that say “Deport Elon”, “Eat The Rich”, and such… but that does nothing.

    Slacktivism:
    characterized as involving very little effort or commitment.

    But what can I really do?