I’ve been feeling restless about my blog for a good long while. Wanting to update, not quite wanting to commit the words I want to say to the vastness that is the internet. However, a resurgence in indie websites and personal blogging has given me a bit of motivation, so I’m hoping this is the kick up the butt I need to get moving again.

To “celebrate” this I’ve gone old school with my theme – partly inspired by one of mine from 2006 (yes, I’m that old) and partly inspired by McLuhan by Anders Norén. I’ve thrown this together in a couple of hours, so testing has been limited especially on mobile devices – but I’ll worry about that later. I also plan on adding a dark mode, because of course.

The key thing about this update is going back to basics and stripping out a lot of the superfluous imagery. Adding images to my blog was always an attempt to please the crowd and not because I actually gave a shit, and I think that’s part and parcel of why I started to withdraw. This was about my words in 2002, and should be about my words now.

I’m going to try and blog once a week until the habit kicks in again, but how many times have I said that before? We’ll see…

I’ve been talking to a lot of clients lately about migrating their websites to Gutenberg. If you saw my last post on Gutenberg development, you’ll know I’ve been building more and more sites with it recently. Still sticking, stubbornly, to classic editor for my own site(s) though. Eating your own dog food – or dogfooding… read full entry »

New Look! Yes, as you can probably see, I’ve changed the way the site looks again. I’ve been tinkering about with this one for a while between work projects. The theme is based off the lovely Storyteller by Mauer Themes. I paid for the theme (fair’s fair) then completely re-created it so that it would… read full entry »

After spending the past week or so having a regularly scheduled blog crisis, I spent most of last night hunched over my laptop (literally, my back is killing me this morning) poking and prodding at the keyboard, trying to come up with something new. I’ve felt for a while that my blog wasn’t accurately representing… read full entry »

Alright me duckies, how are we all? You may notice that things look a bit different. I’ve gone a bit old skool, drawing inspiration from some seriously old layouts of mine. Kudos if you have been around long enough to remember the originals. I’ve not finished faffing with it but it’ll do for now. Or… read full entry »

As we rapidly approach the 13th anniversary of me owning jemjabella.co.uk and my 15th year of blogging, I can’t help but think about how blogging (both my own, and on a wider scale) has changed over the years. 15 years ago it wasn’t uncommon for people to write blog posts thousands of words long. Blogs… read full entry »

One of the things I am really keen on doing this year is to improve my workflow / development process. I have a very “make it up as I go along” approach to building a website (as demonstrated by my live dev ;)) which I think is fine for personal projects sometimes, but when you’re… read full entry »

Despite the fact that you’re all sat watching — refreshing regularly — to monitor the progress of my blog’s live development (you are, right?) I thought I’d give a run down of what’s happened so far, and what’s yet to come… New search bar across the top so you can easily search from anywhere (and… read full entry »

Eagle-eyed visitors will notice some slight changes here: the addition of a third column, changes to the footer, etc. I’ve converted my theme to run off the genesis framework (mostly for the power of the widgets and templates and all that crap). In theory it means easier maintenance in the future, and has taken about… read full entry »

I know, it’s true, I probably announced at one stage that I’d never read ‘proper’ mummy blogs (or blogs written by mums, whichever way you look at it). I also said I’d never talk about poo, and look how that turned out. Here is my confession: I, queen of the hypocrites, am a champion “mom… read full entry »