I’m a day late again, it’s after work on Monday. Shame on me. I don’t even have an excuse really, I just didn’t feel like being on the computer all that much yesterday.

Overcoming Analysis Paralysis

I spent a good portion of my week’s evenings working on a very simple site for my side consulting business, Room 641A. Oh yeah, I have a side consulting business. Surprise! But I’m not going to spend more of this section talking about that – you can visit the site if you want to see more.

Instead, I want to talk about how I’ve had this consulting business for 9 months, and I’ve been saying I’m going to make the website for 6 months, and why I only finally just got it done.

I really struggled with this project, because I felt like I wanted the site to really capture how I wanted to portray the business and my skills and what I bring to the table. But every off the shelf hugo theme I looked at felt too… corporate, or too startup, or too SaaS. Too Blurple. I spent 6 months not working on this project because I was too stuck on this. This inconsequential. meaningless. shit.

Ultimately I ended up going with hugo-dead-simple. It was, well, dead simple. But something about this resonates with me. I don’t want to be in the business of selling you fluff. I don’t want to sell grandiose solutions that promise to solve all your problems. That’s bullshit and we both know it. The last thing you need is to buy another half-baked security solution, or another contractor who comes in and does the bare minimum before leaving your team with unmanageable garbage. I want to give you no-fluff, actionable advice and get to the core of what problems you’re facing. So maybe dead-simple was the perfect theme for the feeling I wanted to convey.

It did end up being a little too simple so I wrote some code to show a smaller version of the logo in the corner when the main logo isn’t present, using Intersection Observer. I wish I could have done it in pure CSS – I think it’s possible, I just don’t think I’m the right person to figure it out.

By choosing such a minimal theme, I was able to get past all the problems I had with all of the company style themes that Hugo has available. I was able to completely sidestep my paralysis by just discarding all of the things I was hung up on and going for one of the simplest options. Then I was able to focus on writing some content instead of worrying about which stock photo I wanted to use (I don’t, stock photos are cliche and boring and not really me), which illustration styles I wanted to use (I don’t, most illustration styles are boring and remind me of startups blowing VC money), etc.

So anyways, this is just my reminder to myself that sometimes it is far better to just crank through and get something done, rather than spend months agonizing over getting something perfect, only to be no further than when you started.

Hollywood on Streaming Services Now

I had a song from several years ago, Hollywood, that I realized was never put on streaming services. There are some legitimate reasons why some songs aren’t on streaming services, but this one did not have any of those reasons. I just had this mistaken idea that it was going to cost me like $30 per published song, which is insane because I haven’t made $30 off all of my music combined in the last 4 years yet. But that was just me being dumb.

So anyways, Hollywood is available now on some platforms, and will be available on even more platforms over the coming weeks. It’s one of my favorite songs, because Hollywood hacking is near and dear to my heart. If it wasn’t for Hollywood hacking, I wouldn’t have discovered my own love for hacking, and I wouldn’t be here today.

Interesting Links

• How to Monetize a Blog - I wasn’t sure about this one going into it, but reading it was wonderful and I highly recommend it as a scathing review of how advertising has perverted the internet.

Upcoming Projects

• A conference that wishes to remain nameless currently has it’s CFP open. I am exploring a few ideas for talks to submit. (Due: 2024-10-01)