Let's make a better website!
Websites are cool
Personal websites are a fairly unorthodox interest I have. Websites come in a lot of different forms, and there are a lot of different ways to go about making a website, from simple HTML blogs to full-blown interactive web applications.
For this reason, I find personal websites a lot more interesting than social media pages, where not only are pages formatted the same, a lot of the time the content itself is as well.
Neglecting the site
Despite my interest in websites, I haven't paid much attention to my own site. For quite some time, my site was basically just a glorified business card, just a place on the Internet that links to other places on the Internet like my YouTube and Odysee Channels, my Matrix Space, my Discord Server, and my Email Address.
Keeping things simple is of course fine, and I know people who use tools like Carrd and Linktree for this very purpose, but renting out a VPS just to have a glorified business card is a bit overkill in my opinion. So I felt the website needed a bit more substance, a reason for people to actually visit it.
Changes I've made recently
- Ditching Google Fonts
- Putting the website on the Tor network
- New Content
- Web Applications
- Better Images and more of them
For quite some time, I was importing Google Fonts so the website would look the same across all devices. However, I decided to stop using Google Fonts because I don't want my website phoning home to Google just so fonts can load correctly. In fact, using Google Fonts makes the website non-compliant with the GDPR.
It is possible to host your own fonts, but it's a bit of an inconvenience. So for now, I'm just using system fonts. Though this means the website will look slightly different depending on the device.
There's no logical reason to do this, I just thought it would be funny.
I've started writing articles on this website. I wrote a few before, but I've started to do them more frequently. There's no set schedule for when I'll write one, it's basically whenever I feel like talking about something but don't feel it's worth making a video about.
Currently, I just have TazSearch (a crappy home page) and DawsonBoard (just a soundboard for Steven Dawson sound effects), but I'd like to add more interactive stuff.
I hate web bloat, that's largely why I got rid of Google fonts and try to avoid using too much JavaScript, but one optimisation I overlooked for some time was using bloated images. The content on this site has a maximum width of 1000px, so there's no point making an image 1080p. There's also no point in me using PNGs when a JPEG or WEBP probably won't look any different for the kind of stuff I post here and will be considerably leaner.