Introducing: (In)Sitze 2.0

Hey, visiter! If you’re new here, (In)Sitze is a personal website and blog for highlighting various interests of mine, including music and lately, web design! If you’re a frequent visiter, you may have noticed some changes within the last week or two. Without getting too prolix, here’s a brief bulletin and explanations of some of the more significant stuff:

• The most important thing is the Subscribe button, located in the header and footer. This is a newsletter from me with several options for receiving updates on my music or from me in general. If you’re a friend, family, or fan, this is the best way to keep up with what I do as I move forward with my projects.
• insitze.org has transformed to insitze.com — ultimately it’s just a label, but the .com extension felt better-suited to the purposes of the website. .org could seem confusing, especially because (In)Sitze is more portfolio-focused rather than for commmunity or non-profit, whereas .com has a more general scope and can accomodate small-business ventures, such as music merch down the line (the site will always remain ad-free).
• The whole site has been redesigned from the ground up—practically (In)Sitze 2.0. I’m working in WordPress and switched to a free hybrid theme called “Blocksy” which allows me to edit the site with WP’s block editor and use things like Customizer with Widgets, which creates a whole new range of design choices and even more analysis paralysis!
• Updates to existing pages:
  Home: Blog posts with stickied post, featured new music, upcoming events, and Instagram feed are directly accessible from the homepage. Status update shows a timestamped message and my online/away/offline status. The sillhouette-ornament icon is now a .gif that I made myself in Paint.NET and Davinci Resolve.
  Music: Shows all music platforms you can find me on, my latest music,—latest song, featured live performance, recent tracks—livestreams, including a live Twitch embed, audio-only playlist from the latest stream, and a YouTube playlist archive of all the VODs, and finally, PDFs of all my sheet music (arrangements and compositions).
  Contact: There is now a contact form to get in touch with a message and small image file. Additionally, employers can take a copy of my resume, and there’s a technical guide for live sound engineers to read more about my looping rig via Google Doc.
• New Pages:
  Live Events: Simple Bandsintown embed that displays any upcoming shows or tours, past events, and a “Request A Show” button that I’m not sure actually works. Eventually I’ll also embed Facebook events when there is one.
  Blog Posts: Archive of all blog posts sorted recent to oldest with a featured post and calendar for easier navigation to past posts.
  What Am I Up To?: This was the most fun page to design so far. It is the most alive, displaying a number of activities, such as listening to music, gaming, reading, and watching movies, some of which update in real-time! Those widgets work by fetching data directly from the API of services like Steam or Last.fm and detects any user activity from me as it happens, which then automatically displays it on the page. Full disclosure: I am not a coder (yet), and the service widgets (including status update) were entirely vibe-coded from Chat-GPT.
  Unorthodox Paradoxes: A page dedicated to listing a number of unresolvable contraditions, aka paradoxes, that exist OUTSIDE the mainstream (e.g., not Chicken or the Egg (boring)).
  Instagram (Gallery View): Literally just my Instagram profile embedded on a webpage with a gallery view. That way, you don’t need to be on instagram itself to find my presence there, I suppose. Like…if you aren’t on social media, or something.
• Coming soon…:
  Eventually, I would like to create a few more pages, either for utility or for fun. For example, I’ve seen a lot of Guestbooks on people’s personal sites, which I think is a neat idea—something to sign if you’re passing through and want to check in. I also will soon put up a page dedicated to the Newsletter, which describes the topics in more detail and also gives you an option to opt in/out of notifications for certain topics. There’s some more aesthetic ideas I would like to try later on as well, such as a light/dark theme toggle, or maybe a cursor trail for desktop…
  

That pretty much covers it. To sum up: (In)Sitze is fresh, stable, handsome, and in good standing to expand as my lived-in home on the web. In a related post, “What Do I Want Out of a Personal Website,” I discussed my feelings and reasons for maintaining a personal domain. In the following year, many of these sentiments remain the same, although a lot around my life has changed. (In)Sitze 2.0 brought me one or two layers deeper into the world of web development, which I consider a hobby with practical benefits. While it is a whole skillset in a sea of hardcore enthusiasts and professionals that are basically wizard-tier, I am so far content with my humble corner of the internet over here at (In)Sitze. Despite the challenges, I am grateful for having this creative outlet and being able to connect in a much more organic way than social media when it comes to the World Wide Web.

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