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People And Websites #2 - Joel

~7 mins 10 Oct 2024

And here comes the second edition of People And Websites brought to you by yours truly! Our guest today is non other than Joel, a good blogging friend of mine!

Hey! Can you introduce yourself to the readers?

Hey, I'm Joel, I go by joelchrono on the internet most of the time, I like Chrono Trigger.

I would consider myself a jack of all trades, master of some? when it comes to hobbies at least.

I practice a lot of hobbies, depending on my mood or whatever rabbit hole I get myself into. I do origami, card magic, retro-gaming, drawing, reading, coding, linux stuff, and regular stuff.

I would say I'm pretty good at the things I like to do, however, even if I like them, I tend to procrastinate a lot. I am perfectly aware of it, but sometimes I end up focusing on one thing, then another, and I end up not doing some important stuff.

Regardless, I am also a Mechatronics Engineer, but my job is barely tangentially related. My hope is one day I could live off of donations from people who like my blog! I'm mostly kidding... but maybe.

Where did the name joelchrono come from?

So, at first my username around the web was joeligj12, it was basically my first name—I'm Joel btw---followed by all of my initials and the day of my birthday. This remained unchanged for quite a while. It made sense to my Spanish speaking brain at the time---I was 12 years old so of course it did.

During my game development arc back in 2020-2021, I participated in a variety of game jams, and was absolutely thrilled after I found out some streamers and channels on Twitch and YouTube were actually streaming their gameplay of many game jam entries. I really wanted them to play mine and feel like I was famous or something.

I loved watching people playing my game, figuring out the puzzles or mechanics I designed, and taking note of their feedback and suggestions. However, everytime they tried to pronounce my username, well, it wasn't great...

"Great game joel-ei-gee-j, em, joel ei-yee-jay, joelei-jey-jey, joeligee... whatever"

Similar things happened time and time again, so I cringed very hard and I decided to change it.

There were two options, something Zelda related, or something Chrono Trigger related. I went for the latter since I felt like it connected better with my name, and never looked back. Chrono Trigger is my favorite game of all time after all!

At first I kept the 12 at the end mostly to still be a bit familiar with my old username, but over time I felt like it was too long to type, and removed it from most of my urls and usernames around the web, and it has stayed that way since then.

What's the story behind your website? What made you want to start it? Run me through the whole story!

I had a website before this one, made on blogger around 2012, I wrote about in an older blogpost, it was more of a Club Penguin news site with articles I pretty much copy-pasted to my site, I also used to have another website where I shared tutorials and diagrams of origami models, obtained from questionable sources, those were the days, I was just a kid and didn't know better.

It was kind of cool to mess around with Blogger, and it was a way for me to also get into graphic design, I remember watching tutorials to make my own Club Penguin logo and avatar on Photoshop, I enjoy doing my own designs to this day, but I never really posted many articles in any of those blogs.

I recall trying Tumblr at some point, I feel like, had I stuck with it, my online presence would be quite different, but it wasn't meant to be, and that's totally fine by me. I didn't know much English back then either, so the most active userbase of those places were out of my reach.

Years later, and during the pandemic, I really got into game development, linux AND the fediverse at the same time. My engine of choice was Godot, an open source engine that I used to make games for multiple game jams. Eventually, because of Linus Tech Tips, I dual booted Pop_OS on a desktop computer I had, and put Godot on it, I quite liked the way things were and wanted to interact with more people about the subject. I remember finding some Telegram groups and even on Facebook, but at some point, probably because of a video by Distrotube or one of the many Linux YouTubers, I discovered Mastodon! I created like 5 or 6 accounts in multiple servers because that's what a noob does, but I finally landed on Fosstodon, which is still my main account nowadays.

From there, I discovered the #100DaysToOffload challenge, by Kev Quirk, and I followed his guide to build a website with Jekyll and SimpleCSS. Initially, I kinda wanted to be something like Android Police and such, review apps and Android news, but my interests were quite varied so I just started writing about whatever topics piqued my interest.

I remained quite consistent during the whole year, and I managed to beat the challenge on my first try, and I decided to keep blogging moving forward, up until now!

What's your tech stack?

Hmm, I am super cheap, and I don't pay for any hosting and the like.

I got my domain from Porkbun, it's cheap, simple and its logo is a pig. I host my website with Vercel, I used to use Netlify, I could go back, both are pretty good free options.

I generate my website with Jekyll, out of some folders and markdown files. You can access my GitHub repo to check it out if you wish.

As I mentioned, I started with the SimpleCSS stylesheet, but mine has evolved a lot and it's pretty much its own thing nowadays. It is a bit of a Frankenstein with bits inspired by a variety of websites, but I like it.

I have multiple scripts to manage the creation of new blogposts, adding pictures, and such. I have quite a few liquid templates and plugins for link redirects, Mastodon based comments and similar functionality that you can check on my blog's Jekyll tag.

What's your favorite part of having a website?

I like that I can customize it however I want and just write about whatever I want.

It is just the best, and thanks to RSS, it can be followed by people as well.

I love learning how to get things done, figuring out CSS or Javascript has been very fun and I've learned a ton out of it, even if sometimes it feels like I'm only copy pasting things, for a reason or another, when something doesn't work at first, I can always try to change it to my liking.

Why do you like retro gaming so much?

I think that I like the simplicity of the old times, and also the fact that most games were less than a gigabyte in size helps. I think that the improvements in graphics has not really brought that much innovation, only taking up more storage on my devices.

Old games, especially JRPGs, have a lot to say, in a tiny package, and I just think that's awesome. Today, they can be played from pretty much any device with a screen, and I just wish companies realized people are still willing to pay them for those experiences, if they are handled well.

Sadly, things seem to be going in the opposite direction, but well, that's a topic for another day.

Recommend me a few people that have a really cool website and who I should interview next

There's quite a bit of people but some really awesome sites I'd like to shoutout for this!

This was Day 18 of #100DaysToOffload!

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