[~15 second musical intro jingle composed by Madalyn Merkey] Elliott: The first thing I’d like to ask you … Can you describe the room you’re sitting in? Korede: It’s weirdly angled. Most of the stuff in my bedroom is out of the line of sight of the camera. I’m sitting at a desk. I have a bed sitting in the middle of the room. There is a floor lamp in the corner there. I actually thrifted that floor lamp. You can’t see it but it looks nice. I have a desk I’m sitting at right now. I have bamboo shoots around the room for the vibes. I have my flag behind my laptop. A little fuzzy chair right beside the desk as well. It’s a bedroom, I suppose. It’s what it is. E: I like the plants. Are they everywhere? K: I just have a few bamboo shoots here right now . They’re all standing around. I might get more. E: Could you describe the first website you created? K: I first learned HTML on CodeAcademy in 2012 or 2013. One of the projects was a weird dumb website that was supposed to be a personal page. I threw everything I’d learned about HTML / CSS on that. I really liked border-radius at that point, so everything had a border-radius and funny colors. Whatever very early version of CSS grid existed at that point, I played around with as well. At that point, I was really digging responsivity. You could have websites that work just as well on your phone as on your laptop. It was just a little extra code. I tried to make my site responsive at least. Had a nice little sidebar that would hide itself on mobile. I used to like playing around with that. E: Yeah, whoa. That’s really cool. What was the website for? Was it your personal blog? K: It was meant to be a personal front page. I almost don’t remember the exact contents of it. I just remember things I did, because I was trying to test out stuff I learned. E: Could you describe your workflow of updating your website currently? K: Yeah. Actually the current iteration came after by throwing out everything that was there before. It was a little more elaborate, it had some fancier stuff but I decided to throw it out in favor of something a lot simpler. I stuck with Jekyll, a blogging framework-like thing… some Jekyll extensions I found on the internet and pieced together. Mostly from this one tutorial that someone wrote about building a digital garden / wiki, so very much inspired by that. It’s just a bunch of markdown files sitting around somewhere. The markdown files are the blog posts, there is some formatting for those. Some stuff for the main page. There are a few other pages that I threw out or am not actively using. If you follow the right path of the links, you can still follow how the old site used to look like, which is funny. E: Yeah, I’m interested in that progression… having old bits of your site within the current iteration of your site. Do you take a pretty iterative approach to working on your personal website? Like it’s something that you’re always building but not necessarily throwing out and restarting? K: Yeah. I figure it’s my personal website so I can do what I want with it. I’m fine with having a bug sit there for a while. Sometimes just leave a bug and let that become a weird, quirky feature. I guess just fun with that. I used to have a canvas thing… there was a photo of my face on the first page, and if you clicked on the photo it would expand, it was a canvas you could use a multicolored brush on… I was going to bring that back but kind of hide it. I was going to put a marquee that would slide over the screen every certain interval, so you could catch a link to the little paint thing. I remember showing someone that, they were like, “There’s a bug in how you draw the brush,” and it was one of those places where it was perfectly acceptable to be like “yeah, I don’t really give a fuck.” E: If you could bring back one website from the dead, what website would that be? K: Probably cartoonnetwork.hq.net. The pages with all the games. Those games were all flash websites, so I’m not sure if they are still supported. Those games were great. I would love to play them. E: Cool. Yeah, we’ve had a few previous participants, I think Becca Abbe (this designer and developer) talk about another website where there’s flash games on it. There’s a lot of nostalgia for flash games. E: If you could pick 3 HTML elements, what would be your top 3? K: That’s a good question. is usually the top of the list, but I guess that’s dead and gone. has been a favorite recently… it’s a realm or a portal to a different UI framework within HTML, which is fun. I love the inline style tag, I love to throw that around. People like separate CSS files, but I tend to be tired of that sometimes. There are some standard tags that are barely used. Usually people use
for header and footer and content, but there are still
,