Since “retiring” a few years back, I still manage to spend a lot of time in front of the big iMac on my desktop. Only a couple of small jobs bring any income, but there are other, volunteer kinds of things that keep me busy doing that web thing I spent nearly twenty years pursuing professionally.
When there isn’t anything else, I often find myself tinkering with my own collection of websites, tweaking and adjusting and experimenting. If I can’t provide continuous updates to the content, the least I can do is make it all look different.
Recently, for instance, on the EasyWriter home page I tricked out the icons that provide links to my Facebook, Instagram and YouTube presences. I’ve been updating the main colors to match those in my Tumbling Pixels feature, and I wanted to use the same colors for those icons.
The easiest way to do that, it turns out, is to use SVG icons and style them with CSS. But I had to do a little self-teaching first, a combination of video learning and written tutorials outlining the steps to accomplish the task. It wasn’t all that hard, given the skills I already possess, but it was a wee bit tricky. Nevertheless, the results are worth the effort.
The page that displays all my handmade fonts has gotten a couple of updates, including a list of font tools, several of which I have worked with. My “about” page got a couple of tweaks as well. Some of those were adjusting for the recent secure HTTP protocols now in place across my web presence.
A related addition involved the other “John Banks” found across the internet and the rotating GIFs featuring a number of their faces. There’s a simple online tool that takes individual images and creates an animated GIF, with settings available for speed and transitions and more.
If you visit often enough — and I hope you do — and pay close enough attention, you may notice these changes as I make them. Otherwise, I’ll likely provide an overall update like this again in the future. Especially when my free time provides a canvas for my efforts.
