Ever since I updated the website to be more “streamlined,” I’ve had a hard time coming up with things to write about in the blog. Or so I thought. I began to believe that maybe blogging and writing freely about frivolous things just wasn’t my thing anymore, so I’d left this section of my site blank while writing a disclaimer to disappointed visitors: Monologuing isn’t as fun as it used to be for me.

In situations like these, it’s usually a good idea to try and pick apart why something like that may be. Experiencing burnout as somebody who enjoys writing is generally frustrating, but I’ve realized that—for me—there’s always something kind of strange behind it. Something like the weather. The atmosphere. The keyboard, the pen. What inspires inspiration?

The other day, I finished converting and updating the “secret room” portion of the website to the new format. More importantly, though, I set up an electronic diary in it to write down my thoughts in a way that works for me: not only is it accessible from just about any modern device with networking, but I made a “mini-library” system similar to the one I use sitewide to manage diary entries. All I need to do is fill in a title, submit, and write away on the page it generates for me.

This blog, until now, used a completely different system. I had it connected to the main library, from where the blog’s index page would aggregate any pages that had a “blog” tag on them. Making a page, however, is tedious. It’s very manual: you need to write down a title, a URL, make sure the navigation bar items make sense, and then make sure some dummy text is passed through a textbox. Once you do all that, you have to then navigate back to the blog index page and look at it show up in an ugly, creepy, cream-colored box in a big, obnoxious list with way too much information separating the article down to way too many lines. It looks bulky. It feels bulky. It’s terrible for a writer wishing to be free. The suffocating red poppy background on the left-hand side only reminds you that something here is amiss; it’s an incomplete work of art just waiting for someone to come around and throw it away.

So, I just scrapped everything and redid it.

It’s now a lot more similar to how the diary works (which, by the way, I’ve been writing in almost daily!), so everything feels far more accessible. The text on the index page is simple, unobtrusive, yet quietly garish in that fun Sakinorva way. I like it so much more. I updated the paneling on the left-hand side, too, to now show a nicely edited seamless image of about 50kb that pulls you out of the screen and puts your mind at ease. How nice. See, this is what I should have done all that time ago!

Website designing is such a strange activity, but finding your peace and style in it makes it all so worth it. I don’t know if I’ll have that much to show here even now, since I spend most of my time writing in my secret diary, but I’ve at least taken care of the brick wall that was standing before me, right?