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My Shitty Sites

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During the pandemic, I’ve redesigned my personal websites many times over, very few of which went anywhere. In this post, I want to go over them.

Note that this is a successor to revisiting my personal sites I wrote years ago and will be updated over time.

Farai Gandiya (www.farai.xyz)

My personal site.

www.farai.xyz (March 7, 2022 @a1fa)

A header with some text in serif font

This was the most recent version of my personal site www.farai.xyz. It looks pretty plain but I like the serif font on it. The Links page link went to an invalid location, but nobody noticed it because nobody read the site.

Farai’s Codelab (codelab.farai.xyz)

I made Farai’s Codelab as a way to experiment with code and make interesting things. It didn’t work out as I’d hoped.

March 1, 2022 @82eb

The text ‘Hi, I’m Farai Gandiya and this is my Codelab. I’m program things and write about them here on my programming digital garden.’ in a funcky font against a blue background

This was the most recent version of Farai’s Codelab. It had a lot of cool things like the funky Recursive font, dark mode complete with a theme switcher, p3 colors and a lot of under the hood work. I made something similar the year before, but it got unwealdy.

Realistically, this site might end up looking like that.

December 30, 2021 @8e0b

The words ‘Hi, I’m Farai Gandiya and this is my Codelab. This site hosts my programming portfolio and technical blog.’ against a blue background

This was the version I used for most of 2021. Not the best designed site out there, but I’m especially proud of the color scheme and gamut switcher as well how I configured the repo to schedule posts. It’s terrible for many reasons, but it mostly worked.

I’m hoping to always keep it live on https://2021.codelab.farai.xyz/

January 10, 2022 @274f

The site with some posts listed

Most noteworthy thing here is me trying modules. I need to put a lot of thought into them before using them.

January 21 2022 @7607

The site with some posts listed in a sans serif font

I didn’t like the way this site looked though it wasn’t as bad as I imaged it was. It has a lot of goodies like redirects support and build scripts. I forgot to delete the remote so VS Code shows that the commits drift by a lot. Thankfully I don’t have to resolve that conflict.

59 commits to pull, 69 to push

Also, the dark mode was terrible. since I didn’t fix the browser defaults.

February 10 2022 @6a28

The words ‘Hi, I’m Farai Gandiya and this is my codelab. I program and write about programming. Here you can find my programming blog and portfolio.’ in a mechanical font

This was an attempt at making my site as I’d initially envisioned it before the pandemic. I just got overwhelmed and abandoned it. It had a better build script as well as redirect and feed support.

February 13 2022 @bda4

Just another attempt. I got confused with CSS and I discovered the digital garden concept I now use.