Hello World
Note from 2022: This was a post written in my previous wordpress-based blog, which I developed (kinda) from scratch. Enjoy
I made this website from scratch in 12 days, with zero prior experience in coding/web design.
To be fair – it was more like 12 days and nights of interminable coding and headaches. (I mean it quite literally – I had a nightmare of being stuck in a cubicle, having to code thousands of lines)
But why?
I could say I have some obsessive tendencies.
I’m not really the materialist type, but I do tend to collect – or sometimes hoard – some stuff. For instance, in high school, my hard drive was filled with images of artworks and mp3 files of musical pieces of my favorite artists, organized into the genre and then into artists’ names. I also liked to carry a camera with me almost all the time, so I had a substantial collection of photos I took since I was 10. They were all organized into folders according to date (most of which were lost when my laptop broke down. I know. ).
I used to instinctively collect things I consider to be uniquely mine. Things that genuinely reflect who I am.
That’s right – I used to keep all my stuff in a hard drive, organized into folders and nested folders and nested folders inside nested folders… But apparently, who does that anymore. Unless you have absolutely nothing better to do (which is sad) or you don’t mind losing all the hard work by spilling water onto your computer.
So yeah, I created this website to give myself a more sophisticated way of holding and coordinating some of my stuff.
Before coding the heck out of myself, I did try some of the ‘easier’ and more ‘accessible’ mediums. You know, like Instagram, Tumblr, or Naver. But apparently the ‘easy’ did not work for me. I could not help but be bothered by several little details that just needed to be tweaked but were outside the user’s capacity to customize. I wanted a website that is authentically mine, to every nook and cranny.
Thus, I coded this website. From scratch, by me who did not know that php is actually a name of a programming language until this very moment (I just googled to check what it is exactly). It’s definitely not perfect yet, but I’m frankly quite satisfied. 🙂
How I learned to code this website.
Youtube.
The first semester of year 4 of uni was nothing but hectic. All the coursework plus (or mostly) the daunting thoughts about post-uni life (should I go to grad school? Where? When? How? UGH) that kept me up at night! I was half-dead (physically and mentally) by the time I was back home in Korea for winter break.
I took some real good rest for the first couple of days, doing nothing but binge-watching Netflix and indulging myself with good old home-cooked Korean meals (the best). Yet, the burn-out must have triggered something in me. After several days’ rest, I was overwhelmed with a sudden surge of a desperate need to learn to code and create my own virtual space.
So I immediately did some quick google search and discovered WordPress’s well-established reputation.
Then I watched ‘wordpress 101’ tutorial on Youtube.
As a complete novice, I simply copied whatever the ‘youtube tutor’ was doing on his screen. I wrote down <?php in a text editor, wondering who on Earth created this weird combination of letters and punctuations. I made a blank theme folder titled ‘jeeeeehye’ (it’s an elongated version of my name, FYI). I copied each line from the tutorials onto functions.php and index.php files (ignorant of the fact that php is actually a programming language).
As I went on blindly copying, I kind of grasped a sense of how this coding thing works.
After watching and copying about 13 videos, I made a rough blueprint of my ideal website in photoshop and … coded it true.
Along the way, I watched videos on javascript. And CSS designs. Whenever I found myself stuck (which was rather frequent), I rummaged through Youtube tutorials, WordPress developer resources, as well as online forums.
Youtube channels I found especially helpful:
On January 4th, 12 days since the day I watched the first WordPress video, I had in front of me a “reasonable” website, with
- a photo/artwork gallery in masonry grid on the homepage
- a tag cloud
- a blogging menu
- minimalist design
- mobile/tablet responsive design Yay >:-)
What exactly is this place?
I am into many things.
I consider myself a to-be-“human-mind scientist”, as well as an (amateur) artist and a photographer. I also like to watch SF films and read books. This place will (probably) stage the significant things I do. It will probably archive the artworks I make, the photos I take, as well as the discoveries and ideas I find worth sharing.
[If anyone managed to read this far, thanks. I appreciate it.]