Regarding me
Hi, my name is Jahan (as you could maybe guess from the domain), and I'm the gardener of this site. I'm a high schooler - not yet old enough to vote, but just old enough to drive. I'll leave my location a mystery, but I think I've mentioned it a few times in the hoverable-text of my dream journal. I suppose if you want to dox me, feel free to look.
I'm only just now making an about page (2023/09/20) as I've found them a bit pointless and never know what to write on them, but since I've noticed myself enjoying reading them on other sites I've decided to make one now.
Regarding the site
This site uses the standard vanilla front-end tools: HTML, CSS, and (on rare occassion) JavaScript. I know many people dislike JavaScript (I can't say I'm one of these people myself, but I sympathize) so I only use it on the random things section of my site (I think, feel free to tell me if I'm wrong). Back-end the site uses lots of PHP and MySQL. Whilst many seem to think PHP a plague, I think that - despite it's irregularities - it works quite well for what it was intended.
The site is hosted through BlueHost, which has a fair share of issues (like full second load times for blank pages). It's cheap though, ergo I use it.
The front-end
I try to keep a fairly minimal front-end. While many things on this site definetly do not scream "minimalist" (like all the background gifs I add), I try to keep the number of things on the screen to a minimum. I'll never put ads nor pop-ups, and I try to keep all the visual elements in the background.
One of my favorite things to add to the site is title
attributes to links and text, so when you hover your mouse over them
(sorry, mobile users) there'll be some suprise commentary attached.
I've thought about indicating which text has this (if you look in
the default
stylesheet for my site you can see commented out styles for this),
but I decided not to add this as it 1) clutters the text and 2)
removes some of the mystery. If you want to look for some of this,
all the links on the homepage have title attributes,
along with a lot of the text in my dream diary
and blog.
The back-end
Pretty much anything on this site which could be automated, I try to automate. The dream, project, thought and photo pages are all hooked up to a database as to make it easy for me to add new things. The RSS pages are also auto-generated. I haven't (yet at least) made any special pages for adding things to the database, since it's just me, and I'm comfortable with the phpMyAdmin interface provided by my hosting provider. I've also had issues with special characters and upload things I've made in the past, so that makes me reluctant as well.
I have two sitemap pages for this site, the main one which I just edit by hand, and one for the articles I write, which is auto-generated. I've thought about automating the main one as well, but it just seems like a long walk for so little water to me.
The homepage
Some people have asked what the photo I have as the background on the site's home is, so anyways, it's a drawing of the Sephirot from Jewish Kabbalah. If you want to know more about that I'd recommend looking elsewhere, but basically it's a diagram from an old religious tradition which I thought would look nice on my site. That might be a bit sacrilegious, but it does look good, doesn't it? I have tried to map the Sephirot to the links in a way I felt meaningful, but I prioritized good design over that.
The scrollbar
The scrollbar on this site I copied from a project dedicated to old UI design (https://jdan.github.io/98.css/). While I only really wanted the scrollbar, it looks great so check it out.