Welcome to Ideothetic Flow! A passion project where I share my reflections on being a better person and building a kinder world.
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Hi!
I spent the last few weeks learning HTML and Bootstrap. To take a more active effort in my learning, I started a small project to use these to make myself a new personal website.
Although it is very basic , I wanted to share it publicly here as I very proud of myself for figuring out how to write the code and host the site from scratch.
You can visit the site at jameschanwz.com.
The site is hosted on Github Pages, a free webpage that comes with a Github account. This had the added benefit of forcing me to get familiar with Github.
This site replaces my now abandoned www.ideotheticflow.com which I used to store this newsletter. Instead of WIX’s drag and drop interface which I used for that site, I find it more meaningful, and have better control by writing the code myself. Also, with my newsletter hosted on substack, I felt little need to replicate the posts on another site.
Owning a small piece of the internet
I have no pressing need for a personal website. I doubt many people will visit it, nor do I have any business or cause that I need it to advance. However, with the digital world growing so fast, I should get started to make a presence for myself on the internet, and have a place to publish anything else I might work on in future. Perhaps it will spark a chance encounter or opportunity.
I also did not want to use a social media profile for this, so that this page can properly reflect me personality, without the algorithms and biases of any platform.
For now, I see this site having two purposes:
An anchor for my identity. This is a place where I publicly declare my understanding of who I am and the things which comprise me. This forces me to reflect about myself. This in turn helps me understand my priorities. It reminds me what parts of me would really hurt if removed, and what I can do without. At a recent conversation, I was asked who I am without my career. Having thought about this in advance gives my answer more conviction and consistency, rather than something I scramble to answer.
A compilation of content to share. I started out by compiling a list of my influences. These are things which have a significant impact on me which I also want to share with others. However, the speed at which new ideas and data appear these days can make it hard to find them again later on as new content takes over the spotlight. Having them here lets me retrieve it easily to share with others. People can also get to know me through seeing my whole list of influences, or might find something useful for themselves. I envision myself adding to this list and making more lists as I update the site over time.
It feels good to build something tangible
I enjoyed the process of building. I felt a sense of achievement each time I manage to put in something new, or fix a problem. It was a nice change from legal work, which often feels like there is no tangible product. Here I could see the site come together slowly as I worked on it. I definitely feel a better grasp of the skill than if I had spent the same amount of time passively learning by only reading or following a course, which ends up with me feeling like I still don’t know enough to make use of the knowledge.
As such, I do hope I can use more projects like this to learn more. I find the biggest barrier is finding an idea interesting enough to work on, and being able to scope it to fit my skill level. Even when I do have inspiration, the ideas are too massive and complicated that I do not know where to start, and thus never get any momentum. One of the things I am trying this year is to scale down and distil those ideas into simple components which I can work on.
Share your thoughts!
If you do visit the page, please let me know what you think, if you spot any bugs, or if you have ideas on things I could put there to make it more interesting!
If you had wanted to do something similar but was not sure where to start, I would be most happy to share my process and help out. You can even re-use the code to save some time.
Have a good week!
James
Thanks for reading! I do hope to hear about your thoughts or ideas!
Let me know by emailing me at jameschanwz@hey.com, leave a comment, or starting a conversation on whatsapp