So, I’m back. (Yes I’ve been back for like a month now but ignore that.)
I set up this site years ago as a way to literally dump all my photos somewhere, sorted by roll, and not much else, hence why it was called “Lolei’s Dump”. It was partly to have a convenient way to send friends my photos while avoiding file size limits (cough Discord cough). But it was, and still is, primarily a learning experience.
It started out as a plain HTML page using lightbox hosted as a Github site. Then I switched it over to self-hosting on a VPS, while also using python scripts for generating roll code. Finally, I rewrote it all in Flask, and it has remained quite similar from then to now. This trajectory of rewrites and rebuilding is one of the many reasons I left this dormant. But now that I’ve gotten past that (mostly), I want to talk about some of the plans I have for this going forward.
Generally, my plans are to just do all the ideas I had previously but kept making excuses for. I had a lot of ideas, but always thought something along the lines of “the gallery section is terrible I can’t until I fix that” or “oh but everything else on the site is such a burden I don’t want to work with it”. So I’ve decided to just ignore that and do things. That’s sort of the spirit of the OPAD project I started on a whim; put something here no matter what it’s surrounded by. Now that I’ve broken through enough to have a consistent project going up here, I think it’s time to try and branch out into some of those other ideas.
The first, and only one I really think I can immediately execute, is writing posts like this again. You can see in the archived section that I have tried this before. It didn’t last very long at all, and I feel like not much effort went into them. I will leave them up, but know that I don’t like them, or want them to reflect what I plan to do from here. So, what are some ideas I have at the moment?
I’m not sure when these will happen, or in what order. But that’s what I’ve got for now.
For the technical side of the website itself, I’m not sure what I’ll do from here. I’d like to sort out stuff that’s mainly for me, like streamlining post uploads for both this and OPAD, but I'm unsure what to do there. There’s also the changelog section. It was an interesting idea that I set up on a whim. I’m not sure I want to actually commit to putting every change I make to the website on there. Right now I’ll play with just putting content changes there, and see how it feels.
For more non-specific plans, I have a few. I’d like to obviously continue OPAD for ideally a year, and write more posts. Along with that there’s also general improvements to the site I’d like to do in the long-term, so that it feels “nicer” to me. Finally, the most general is I’d like to expand this into other areas. I have many different interests, and would like to do something with at least a few of them somehow.
Anyway, I doubt anyone will read this, especially not this far. But thanks for reading regardless. I’ll get to working on the actual content.
-- Lolei <3