Not Just Another Redesign
I recently got a downtime in several of my projects and so I took the chance to work on that one thing that I’ve been meaning to get done – personal website redesign. This is the second redesign of drebbits.com and I decided to come up with a look and feel that could represent my work and my personality somehow. I got fascinated with the idea of ‘Less is More’ direction as I am starting to realize about the massive noise we get everyday and how much our surrounding gets busier as the day progresses. This approach helped me weigh down what’s important to share and what are those that were deemed no value.
[Mac setup photo]
The redesign is straight forward. Everything is visible on the surface beginning from Works – the homepage as I’d like to emphasize that this is primarily a portfolio site, up to the Contact. I get to easily build this with Underscore, Sass, Grunt and flavored with Jetpack magic.
This is not just another redesign. It is so special to me as I finally have the guts to be a grown up and embark on an adventure that has something to do with setting up a server. Never done that before as that thing is scary and costly. But the fact that I made a career out of making websites, it is rightful to bring investment on the table and give myself the dignity as someone who knows what and where he creates his works. Luckily SSD-based cloud hosting is ubiquitous and each of them has advantages on their own. Primarily because of their ‘built for developers’ headline and quite a number of followers, I signed up myself with Digital Ocean. Surprisingly, they do have affordable packages for the, indeed, developers and are flexible if you need to scale up later on.
The ride on setting up a server (from scratch!) was crazy so far but I never expected it to be easy either. Digital Ocean has good documentation and community that helped me along the way. I will find time to write a follow up journal on this exciting discovery.
One last important matter though. With this milestone. I’d like to remind myself to always be thankful to my incredible aunt for being a huge influenced on me. She introduced to me the world of online publishing and ultimately end up with WordPress. She’s my savior that gave shelter to my online version for 5 years and patiently guided me in getting out there. Props to her with every bit of my heart!