Somewhere along the way, I began neglecting my old site. It just wasn’t interesting anymore.

So when I launched this new website, I wanted to build something that was more than somewhere to put a bunch of information - I wanted it to be fun to build and fun to maintain.

I feel like I totally nailed it. I’m having a blast.

Overengineering Isn’t Always Bad

When building this new site, I consciously made the devision to overengineer it to death. While overcomplicating things is detrimental to getting actual work done, this is a personal, self-developed, self-maintained site - the negative impacts of overengineering it are essentially non-existent. The benefits, however, are abundant.

By overengineering everything, it gives me a reason to experiment with new approaches and compare the results over time. If I over-abstract something, I can just condense it down. If a component gets too complicated, I can easily just uncomplicate it. Experimentation without risk.

Chaos Breeds Creativity

Since the new site is meant to be as wild as possible, I’m free to build any idea that comes to mind - without limitations. Every time the train runs off the tracks, it adds value. Ridiculous color palettes? Shoddy animations? It all fits.

That freedom has given me an outlet to just keep building. The more I build, the more wild ideas I think up. The more ideas, the more I build. The circle continues.

I’m more inspired now than I have been in a long time.

What’s Next

Over the past few days, I’ve been putting it all to the test. Building, refactoring, and refining.

When I set out to build the light, dark, and sanity modes for this site, I wanted to do it in a way that allowes continuous extension with new modes and features. Last night, I was able to put that approach to the test by adding a “Hot Dog Stand” mode (shoutout to this tweet for the idea). As it turns out, I was right - I was able to add a new mode with minimal effort.

(Try it out using the mode selection at the top-right. It’s awesome.)

Several other ridiculous ideas have come to mind in just the last few days:

• Michael Jackson randomly moonwalking across the page.
• Sonic the Hedgehog tapping his foot whenever there’s a reasosn to wait for an action (or maybe just if someone is taking too long to write a comment).
• Trigger a screensaver if the page has been idle for a while.
• Fully user-customizable themes.
• Deep detection of accessibility features to that automatically adjust the current theme to account for them.
• An e-ink mode.

I’m super stoked about this site.

Ideas?

If anyone has any ideas of what ridiculous things I should build next, let me know in the comments!