Jeremy Staffeld

Tag: website development

  • 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.

  • Nerd Alert!

    “Once you make it to your point of making it, you’ll appreciate the struggle.” – Nas

    Today I set forth on the first of many experiments of which will likely be displayed on this website. I want to build an interactive task list for things needed to be done at my offline job. The easy way is to not use a website and just keep using the Google Sheets spreadsheet that I have been using at the store for a few months. Another easy way is to simply embed said spreadsheet into a page here. Easier still, why not just use one of the many apps and plugins that have already been developed? Nah! What fun is that? No, I want to develop it completely from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

    Now let me qualify why (spoiler alert!) this took me all day and I still could not get it running. It’s been a while since I have done anything but the bare minimum of each of those stated languages. If I am being honest, I still have HTML down pat and I never lost a step. CSS? The muscle memory was still there once I stretched a bit and got my heart pumping. However, JavaScript? It’s like every brain cell that ever contained memories of that language has been lost. And in that lies the problem.

    It was ever exceedingly fun to start my new project. Since it has been so long since I did any true coding, I discovered that I no longer have the tools that I am used to installed on my computer in order to do so. I naively fired up simple Notepad and quickly realized what fresh hell it would be to code all three languages at once via tablet and chisel that is simple Notepad. It was fine when just writing something quick to fix an issue with my established work website but holy lord it wasn’t gonna cut it for a full project. And while Notepad++ probably would have worked okay (in my snobby coding days it was always Notepad++ that I used probably just so I could tell that to hiring managers. If you know, you know). Today I can afford better than okay. Visual Studio Code was a must and free so… I mean, told you I could afford better.

    Working out the HTML and CSS went smoothly and easily. I created exactly what I first envisioned in my mind and at times over stylized it because as you know, this site is meant to be extremely minimalist… almost to an obnoxious degree. For that I ended up stripping a lot of the styles out of my CSS.

    Then came the functionality and so I had to face my old nemesis JavaScript. Alright. No problem. The ol’ interwebs may have devolved into nightmare fuel for social media and news in the last decade or two but they have certainly improved in information finding and tech support, right? Yes, indeed they have and I was able to hack out a functional JS code that completed my project on a static page. Success! Now it will be as simple as embedding this into WordPress and maybe watch a movie or something since the night is still young.

    Wrong.

    Modern WordPress apparently doesn’t want people to add custom CSS/JavaScript easily. Sure, I could just copy/paste the code in a child theme or embed a static page from the server but apparently I have been feeling too cocksure of myself lately so what I actually did was set upon a journey that would lead deep into the night and end without success.

    First, find the right plugin. I want to repeat the processes that went into this experiment, so instead of hard coding, I want a plugin. Well that took a while to find. I went with Simple Custom CSS and JS. It worked great! But my code doesn’t. The CSS does… the JavaScript does not. Keep in mind that the little “app” I made works fine on a static server but not within a WordPress page.

    So I stopped after several hours of going back over my code and trying to research what would be the difference or interference within the WordPress environment. I stopped long enough to watch a few silly YouTube videos and then to write this post.

    But I shall return! And I shall conquer this beast!