I wanted to share a quick life update and some news about this site, since I’ve been MIA for the first half of 2025.
Long story short, I recently started a new job, which has brought some changes to how I manage personal projects—this website included. I originally built this site while I was unemployed and recovering from an illness in late 2024, so I had a lot more time to work on it back then.
In January, I took a break for my birthday month. Then February was a total write-off thanks to Balatro (if you’ve played it, you know). After that, I got caught up trying to rework the site with AJAX to allow continuous music playback—something that ended up being way more time-consuming than expected, especially since I was already using JavaScript across various pages. That brings us to today, where I’ve mostly been focused on work.
To keep things sustainable, I’ve decided to rebuild the site using Eleventy (11ty), a simpler and faster static site generator. This should make it much easier to maintain and update going forward. While I’m proud of having hand-coded the original version with just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—something that really captured the spirit of the old web—manually updating blog posts, RSS feeds, and other site elements became more of a chore than a joy.
Plus, since this was my first website, I ran into a few growing pains—like trying to make it mobile-friendly and adapting to different screen sizes. A lot of that didn’t work out quite the way I’d hoped, which added to the frustration.
As part of the redesign, I’m also replacing the Lem's Log page with a digital garden (which I’m kinda sad about because Lem's Log is such a banger name for a blog page, but I'm workshopping a name for the digital garden). If you’re not familiar with the concept, a digital garden is a more informal, non-linear way of sharing thoughts and content. Unlike a blog, which focuses on chronological posts, a digital garden allows me to publish notes, ideas, and projects as they evolve—kind of like a personal wiki. It’s a great way to share unfinished thoughts and update them over time without the pressure of a "final" post.
Going forward, the main 16bitlemonade site will run on 11ty, and I’ll make some tribute pages with raw HTML and CSS whenever I want to scratch that creative coding itch.
Thanks so much for your patience while I work through the migration.
More to come soon—stay tuned!