New Look Kodiak64: Website Redesign

· Updated

Welcome to the redesigned kodiak64.com. If you’ve been here before, you’ll notice things look quite different. If you haven’t — well, trust me, it’s better than it was.

Why the Change?

The old site was built around long-form tech articles. The problem with long-form tech articles is that each one takes weeks to write properly — researching, coding examples, testing them, writing up the explanations, proofreading the lot. That’s time I could be spending on Parallaxian. The result was that the site went months between updates, which looks like abandonment even when development is very much alive behind the scenes.

The solution: micro blog posts. Shorter, more frequent updates. Quick thoughts on C64 coding, WIP screenshots, scene news, opinions, whatever’s on my mind that week. Less polish, more personality. I can fire off a micro post in an evening rather than spending a fortnight crafting a thesis on raster timing.

What’s New

  • Micro blog — Regular short posts. C64 scene news, WIP updates, coding thoughts, curating notable scene activity. This is now the main content format
  • Online shop — T-shirts, mugs, prints. All C64/Parallaxian themed merchandise. The idea is to generate some revenue to financially support Parallaxian development, because making a C64 game in 2020 is not exactly a lucrative career move
  • Tech articles preserved — The existing long-form articles aren’t going anywhere. They’ll still be updated and new ones will appear when time allows. They’re just no longer the only content on the site

Under the Hood

The whole site is hand-coded in raw HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. No WordPress, no static site generator, no framework, no dependencies. Just a text editor, a browser, and the same stubbornness that makes me write 6502 assembly in 2020. I don’t need a 50MB JavaScript framework to serve text and images. The site loads fast, works without JavaScript (mostly), and I understand every single line of code in it because I wrote every single line of code in it.

Will it win any web design awards? No. Does it work? Yes. That’s good enough for me.

See also: 2022 site maintenance · Tech Noir label identity · Parallaxian