Making my blog more me

Haven’t written in a while (not that I have written regularly ever). I had drafted several posts I never put out there. I think it is because if you publish it on your blog, it feels like you want to show yourself in the best light, you want to look smart, knowledgeable, it can be scary putting yourself out there.

I was thinking about this more lately and some stuff I read made me rethink how I could look at my blog/website:

• A rant on dev.to “I am bored of reading copy writing”, about how impersonal a lot of writing has become.
• Various comments on hackernews reminiscing about the old web and how in myspace times, things were more personal.
• Can’t remember the third one…

So I was asking myself. Why be so careful? Why be so cautious? I should write, do what I feel like… be myself. And so I here I write this post with little clarity of what I really want to convey. Anyway…

So my blog layout design it heavily focused on putting the content first. Currently my posts have no header. The date and title are at the top. Then comes the article. Navigation and my own name come at the end. I wanted to put the content front and center.

And I love that, but what if I want to write a book review, or publish some of my music? Then that visual design and content structure does not fit, does not represent myself well.

So I was in the mood to start putting some musical sketches / tracks on my page. Tracks that I have composed and recorded. So I started playing around with claude code on how to show tracks, how to display them here on this site. First in the same minimalist style I use for other content.

But it did not feel satisfying.

So I asked Claude Code to come up with some fancy audio player, and that felt already more fun. And then I thought: Why not make the entire page a player? And went farther, started to let claude theme the entire page fitting the little track.

And damn that was fun, and I really like the result.

So I will try to let loose a bit more, and hopefully have more fun with my personal page, create space for experiments.

I do regret a bit, that by sharing the track with a claude created design, my page is longer an AI-free zone. I could have implement this design by hand, I would learn a lot in doing so, but do I need to, is it what I want to invest my time in? Would it be fun? Why put myself under pressure? I am happy about the result, I want to share my track. So let’s get it out there and then take the next step.

So enjoy “Dreams of Voltage and Wool”