Tim Rodenbröker
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Mastering the Learning Process 💪: show your work!
🕑 Added 2023-10-20 14:00:05 +0000 UTCHey Creative Coders, ☀️
I hope you are doing well! It's time for another episode of my monthly "Mastering the Learning Process" series, in which I will share some ideas about the power of showing your work and to "learn in public". I always wanted to try to do something with audio only since I am listening to audiobooks and podcasts myself all day. So here we go, this is my first podcast-episode :-D
show your work!
When I made the decision to learn Creative Coding in 2015, I registered a blog on tumblr.com to document my learning process. I spontaneously and intuitively registered the domain https://trcreativecoding.tumblr.com and set parameters using the Magic Triangle method:
- Use Processing
- Generate square gif animations
- Stay under 2MB
The reason that the animations couldn't be larger than 2MB had to do with the fact that that was the maximum upload size of files on tumblr at the time.
So I had built myself an extremely helpful tool with this website that I could use to document my learning.
Tumblr was a leading social network at the time, and in many ways it was better than Instagram today: You could create your own free website there using HTML and CSS, which was very easy to maintain via a simple internal area. In addition, users could easily repost other users' images and videos, resulting in thousands of mood boards on specific topics appearing on the platform.
But then the ship "tumblr.com" sank slowly but surely. More and more ads were placed on tumblr's web pages and quickly many users migrated to other networks. I also decided to jump ship and signed up for Instagram. However, I had also made a decision: I was never again going to fully rely on a platform that was not mine. And so, step by step, I started to build my own website: timrodenbroeker.de. That was one of my best decisions ever.
I've been giving some thought to how I can help my students develop a simple website. In doing so, I absolutely wanted to avoid toolbox systems like Wordpress, which are basically "overkill" for small portfolio projects. Building a small website with Wordpress is a bit like trying to fly a plane to the next village. Rather, I wanted to show how to get there by bike.
At some point I came across a tool that I now think is a very good solution. "Hugo" is a so-called "static site generator". This means that you put your content in a folder and then start a process via a command in the terminal, which automatically generates a web page in HTML and CSS from it.
https://github.com/timrodenbroeker/hugo-themes
I took some time and built a very simple template with Hugo for you. Currently there is no documentation for it, let alone a step by step guide, but if you look around a bit on the official website of Hugo, you will find everything you need.
However, the robustness and simplicity of a Hugo website comes at a price: it takes a little time to get used to the way things work. But it's worth it, because you'll expand your horizons as a creative coder enormously, because you'll learn a lot of exciting new concepts that can be very useful later on.
I'm really looking forward to your feedback!
Please write me in the comments if you liked the post.
For technical questions, I've created a channel on Discord called "Hugo".
Good luck and have a great week!
Tim ☀️
Comments
Tim Rodenbröker
Hi Ricardo! It was so cool to meet you IRL at the Blanc! festival in Vilanova. Thanks a gain for coming there. Yes you are totally right. I think especially for people who work with code Hugo and other static site builders are a graet alternative for the extremely complex world of mainstream CMS like Wordpress. Looking forward to see if people here pick this idea up and start building a website.
Ricardo Lodroño
Hi Tim! You're right, a lot of people is using Wordpress for any kind of website no matter its complexity, even for landing pages that doesn't require such huge boilerplate code and database that comes with WP. It's simply not the right tool for a lot of websites like small portfolios, landing/product presentation pages, etc, but I can understand that if your client wants to be able to edit the contents in a simply way without messing up with code files, WP and its admin panel is the most obvious option. Static site generators are great for personal projects, moreover if you love markdown (like me), as you can focus on content and let the static generator do the hard work in html/css generation.
