Nature is healing

For the first few years after I started making things for the web, I was captivated by the possibilities that were opening up in front of me. I couldn’t get enough of it. I always had 2 or 3 side projects humming away. One of them was always my personal website. I’d ferociously build, then tear down, then rebuild jacklorusso.com, over and over again…

Then the pandemic happened. All of a sudden I couldn’t think of anything worse than closing my work machine at the end of a long day and opening my personal lappy a few hours later to mess around on a side project.

But this past weekend, for the first time in a long time, I felt like coding outside of work. True to form, I rebuilt jacklorusso.com for the hundredth time.

We are so back!

Blogging about blogging

It’s an ancient custom for the first post on a new blog to contain at least a little navel-gazing. You gotta spend a little time blogging about blogging, maybe make some bold claims about what this site is going to be and how often you’re going to post (only to post once or twice more before going completely silent for 4 years). Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

For the last few years ‘micro-blogging’ has been enough for me. Any time I really wanted to get something off my chest, I’d turn to Twitter. It worked! And it was really fun while it lasted. But the bird app has imploded — ‘X’ was the final straw for me.

Facing the fact that I need to start fresh somewhere else made me want to do things a little differently this time around. Own more of what I put out there on the web. Flex those writing muscles a little. Transcend that cringe factor that comes with sharing something personal.

Will I actually stick with it? We’ll see!

On perfectionism

This site looks meh right now. This is intentional. I’m making myself send it first, redesign it later.

I know myself. I know I could spend hours and hours messing around with typography choices and designing a cool brand and playing with generative art and then get distracted by something else and never ship anything. I’ve been there way too many times before. For now, system fonts and normcore vibes will suffice.

In any case, I’m not sure exactly what I will do or say with this site, and for that reason, I’m not actually ready to design it properly yet. As all good designers know, you can’t beat designing around real content. Kill lorem ipsum!

This website is basically feature complete already due to starting with a template (more on that in the next post).

So, the tech is out of the way. Now I just need to write.