meow.garden redesign

I’ve redesigned meow.garden from the ground up, eschewing the “digital garden” concept in favor of something a little more home-grown. The “cool stuff” from my monthly notes have been split out into their own section, and the more interesting notes have been moved to a chronological sequence of posts.

I wasn’t satisfied with the function or the aesthetic of this site’s prior incarnation. Originally, the garden was my way of rejecting social media’s emphasis on engagement, a way for me to experiment with alternative motivations for writing & methods for organizing it. I don’t regard this experiment as a failure; it was an important stepping stone toward manifesting my desired relationship with the Internet. I’m proud of myself for actually committing to removing Twitter from my daily lifestyle! The problem is that I wasn’t nearly as proud of what I had actually built in its place. I grew tired of my writing voice (and still am tired of it, which is making writing this post difficult). I felt like I had nothing left to write about that connected to anything else in the garden. And besides, the site just looked so… plain. I was never particularly excited about adding things to it, which ADHD-havers know is a recipe for not adding things to it anymore after the novelty wears off!

This redesign’s not done yet. For instance, I still want to add some colorscheme-aware generative vector background art. But now that I’ve redesigned the entire site from scratch (and found an elegant way to progressively enhance it with modern JavaScript), making these kinds of improvements should be a breeze. No more learning the idiosyncrasies of someone else’s template!