Welcome to Re:Discover

As you can see, I’ve been revamping the site a teeny bit…

Okay, maybe not teeny but at least I haven’t switched themes again, but for a moment I did thought about it…

But luckily I didn’t. Although I eventually will like to make my own custom them design entirely to my specifications when I’m more accustomed to Ruby and Jekyll.

But that’s neither here nor there, so let’s focus on the present, as you probably noticed. There’s now new pages in the nav bar and more strikingly the site is now called “Re: Discover”.

This will be the third time I change the site’s name, originally just called “Reading’s Blog” I know, very original! Then just recently it was called “The Reading Dimension” when I was really into the idea of a digital garden and took steps to transform my blog into one.

While I liked that name and I still do in part, my main gripe with it is its length. Three words for a tittle is a bit much, and two of them are already pretty long as if. This really came to heads when I moved to the Chirpy theme and noticed that it took so much space on the sidebar. I did try to shorten it to just “Reading’s Dimension” but that still was a bit much.

So around a couple of months back, I’ve been brainstorming for a new title and after a week or so I landed on “Re: Discover”.

I bet some of you already understand the meaning of it but allow me to explain regardless. Looking at it plainly and how it is meant to read and spoken is just like you would with the word is based around: Rediscover. But being the tech enthusiast that I am, I wanted to emphasize that angle by separating “Re” from “Discover” and adding a colon after “Re” so “Re: Discover”.

While the colon or the separation, you may ask? Well, “Re:” is an email term meaning reply, and in normal fashion it also means in regard to something.

Which fits perfectly with what I want this site to become, a place where I share my thoughts on a variety of subjects that interest me, revisiting ideas or media. We can always “Re: Do” things, “Re: Watch” our favorites shows and movies, “Re: Play” our favorite games, “Re: Read” our favorite books or articles. In short, we can always “Re: Discover”.

Since I’m interested in many things, maybe too many, and those may change, this tittle feels like it would be here for the long haul as I change, adapt and learn.

But it’s also not only about me! Re: Discover posits the same question to you. What are you here for? Are you discovering something new? Or perhaps you’re “Re: Discovering” something.

Whatever it is, I would love to hear about it!

But, there’s still more updates to go through, one of the most exciting one for me is my Memos page! I’ve been mulling on creating one for almost a year now, but is now finally a reality. It is party bare-bones, and I’m already planning on revamping it, but even so it’s so nice being able to share short memos on what I’m up to!

If you’re unfamiliar with these kinds of pages, usually called Notes pages. Think of it like Social Media, but you post your “posts” as most social media sites call them on your own website.

I went with the name Memos because Notes can be easily confused with Note-taking, and Memos just felt like a better fit, plus it really emphasizes their length. A few sentences to maybe a paragraph at most.

Along with that, I also created a Now page. Where I keep you all informed on what I’m up to currently. This was extremely fun to make, but I do worry that I may forget to update it as frequently. May look into automating it.

I also removed the Archives page and Categories page, along with categories for that matter!

Categories worked fine at the beginning, but I just find it really restrictive now, Most of my posts are tech related, but I also like to sort them by the tech used. Like Jekyll, for example.

While you can create subcategories, Tags just feel way more intuitive in that regard, so I added completely replace them with a shiny new Tags page! The only problem with tags is tag bloat, which I have fallen into after adding tags to my posts a few months back…

But! It only took some housekeeping and being more intentional with tags to keep them nice and minimal.

Finally, I revamped the Backlog page, I was content with the old one, but a simple list is a bit too boring for me. I modified the Archive’s layout to sort through my backlog entries in _anime _games _manga and _books directories on my site’s root folder by last modified. The result is a pleasant list of the games, anime, manga, and books I logged with the newest and recently updated entries on top. I also added a simple badge to each list item, labeling them by media type.

I’m pretty happy with this, but you know me, I’m already planning something better!

Talking about planning, here’s a not so short list of features and pages I want to implement some time in the future!

• Changelog page, with a list of the site’s recent commits with their changes.
• Uses page, really wanted to get this done, but I ran out of time.
• New logo and favicons.
• Tinylytics Kudos buttons on every post.
• Webmentions
• Guestbook

Probably even more that I don’t remember at the moment, but for now thank you all for reading and hope you all have a great day!