Daniel Carvalho

So finally, here it is. I’ve been working on my website on and off for a few months now, and it’s finally manifested itself into what you see before you. It has been an interesting experience and a testament to my commitment.

There are a few reasons why I wanted to create my own blog. Recently I’ve developed what can only described as a fear of commitment, as much as that sounds theatrically dramatic. The tendency to procrastinate and an amazing ability to annoy myself. I don’t play video games as much as I’d like, and when I do play them, I disrupt the experience by having these huge breaks in-between sessions. The duration of these breaks between playing can be a couple of months, maybe even more. In my opinion, irreparably ruining the game experience. This website is just one small step towards ridding myself of these character flaws. I want to show myself and people what I want to do, not tell them. Less talk, more action. This website was my goal and I committed to it, even though initially I didn’t have a clear vision of the design.

I must say, technically I didn’t expect this to be so much work. Learning how the WordPress platform works and behaves, takes time, and lots of it. Especially when you want to break the norms of blog design. There are a few things WordPress could have done to help accelerate the design and development process, but in the end, it seems to be a really solid system. I really wish they had a bare bones theme with no styling. Basically the stylesheet would contain all the important class and id names with blank declarations. WordPress should instantly remove that extra 10 pixels it adds to the width, via an inline style, to captioned media. Damn that was annoying, I had to mention that. It’s a bug and should be removed, besides being quite uncharacteristic of WordPress, especially since this can be easily achieved with CSS, using padding.

On the flip side, I’m super stoked that I could finally use what has to be — dare I say — my favorite typeface, Gotham. If I were a typeface, I would be Gotham. This website was also a great opportunity to design something contemporary and minimalistic, my style of choice. Please bare with me, as the website will only aesthetically take form — mainly referring to the fat footer — when there is more than one blog post. There are a few areas of the website I’m not completely satisfied with, one being the social linking widget, but I had to make a few small compromises. One big compromise though, was the fact that I sacrificed the portfolio section. It seemed silly to have so much work done on the blog, only to gate the launch with something that could take ages. So I did what was necessary, I cut it.

I’m no WordPress pro, so if you find something dubious or broken, please let me know. I’ve also gone a very uncommon route for blogs, in that I’m only displaying one post on the page, and would like to hear your feedback regarding that. Does it really hamper usability? My aim was to provide focus, to make each post more of a feature and give it greater emphasis. This focus, hopefully, making it easier to read.

I look forward to sharing my opinion on what’s going on in the gaming industry. Hopefully engaging in exciting discussions with anyone that wants to hear, what I have to say. I won’t lie and say gaming is the only topic that will feature here, but it will be my primary focus. Be sure to read more about me, to put this blog into perspective.