What a great quote. It’s not always clear the best time for change, but what has been clear is that the recent proliferation of Random Posts and Picture Dumps on my part is not quite the direction I had wanted the site to go. I think there needs to be a higher standard both for what I write and share – which is what I’m going to try and commit to along with this refresh. Most of the changes you see were done after considering both what the old site did and did not do right. One change on the front page is that you can now find pictures, and tidbits in the Waterfall off to the right. This way, you won’t have to scroll through twenty pages of pictures in between posts, and browsing images is now a bit easier from within the gallery.

A little history tidbit; the original incarnation of mesopixel.com was borne out of a strong curiosity in learning a bit more about web development and infrastructure as well as the eventual necessity of having to move of the University of Toronto servers. For six years, the site ran on Dreamhost’s (rather respectable) shared-hosting plan^[1], and I somehow ended up making 146 posts and uploading over 1050 pictures and comics along the way! It’s still probably one of the longer commitments I’ve made outside of school, which is pretty neat.

A few things I learned from the first site:

• It’s really difficult from a motivation standpoint to maintain a site and or gallery if your tools aren’t dirt easy to use. Every time you make the choice between having to tweak with CSS to make something look the way you want it to, and doing something else more fun, it kills your motivation just a tiny bit and over time, your clever brain begins to dread having to update the site.
• Spammers really suck, but I ended up removing the ability to comment completely for other reasons. Having meaningful conversation on a personal blog is really difficult due to synchronization (expectation of responses), privacy (what you can/can not write in a comment), and context (does the conversation even make sense for anyone else?). I’m sure there's a better solution, but am still thinking about this one.
• Search engines don’t have very good image recognition, and having proper accessibility attributes and descriptions on images/content/links allow for people to find them easier. Apparently, people really like to search for pictures of the 1000 Islands (in Ontario), as well as people getting slapped in the face (some image I linked to ages ago).
• People don’t like clicking off the front page. On average, people spent about a minute and a half on the old site, but the probability they clicked on any other page was really, really tiny (like 1.6% on certain pages). Perhaps I contributed to this by having all the good stuff on the front page, or perhaps I was convinced that the only way for content to be seen was to put it on the front page. I’m not sure which predates which.
• Having a dark theme results in higher contrast when looking at ordinary photos, and really brings out the vibrance of the colours in those photos! This is also why you see a lot of modern displays displays with dark bezels.
• Sometimes you just don’t feel like writing and laziness will evolve into complacency. This is really difficult to break out of. Best not to post while in this state.
• Information and opinions get stale. This is a widely acknowledged problem that I might not try and tackle. There is also a bit of charm and nostalgia in being able to go back in time and reflect on how you felt about things before, and how you feel about them now.
• Code is all easy to write, but difficult to read. Simplifying the design, and organizing the code and services better goes a long way to maintaining a site.

I’m hoping that this kind of experience will help guide what I do with this new site over the next few years.

My next post is going to be more technical in nature, and I’ll be describing some of the technologies that this new site is built on. For a bit of nostalgia, you can always find an archive of the old site in the mesopixel archive.

Apologies in advance if you hit an error page, as the site is still very much under development.

^[1] Also known as the "Crazy Insane Domain" hosting plan