• 2025-11-03 *

Job hunting has necessitated making a new professional site and bearblog is here already, so.

This past weekend I had a job application I needed to do for a job that involved web accessibility, so I wanted to quickly slap together a bearblog site that I could link to in the application. I want to Prove I can Website, but I don’t actually want to have this blog/username/identity associated with my Professional Identity. It’s a difficult tension.

My tl;dr opinion: I don’t trust employers and want to be able to say what I want, too many universities and public institutions now have social media policies that include anything you may say online even if it has nothing to do with your actual work affiliation.

It’s not Great Opsec ™ to have both on the same account and I’m not hugely happy about it, but I just simply do not have the time or energy to put together something separately. I’ve been sitting on a barebones github pages site for months, unable to bring myself to do anything with it. This is the “done is better than perfect” option. So I am just asking for plausible public deniability. I have also made all the posts/pages non-discoverable so they wouldn’t show up in the Discover feed. Herman knows who I am, but he already does anyway because I paid for my sub with my credit card via Paypal. It would be great if any of you, dear readers, figure it out (or already know) you can keep it to yourself.

Part of the job hunting experience is putting an excruciating amount of personal information on the web in the first place. I hate it. All of my PPI is probably in several databases by now. And there really just aren’t that many people on the planet with my full legal name. Once you know my last name and where I live or a few other things about me it is actually very easy to narrow down. When I lived in a much smaller/more rural area and was responding to surveys or things like that if I had to put my name or email address in, that automatically made the survey non-anonymized and responses immediately traceable to me. I have no plans to change either my given or my family name, but it’s not great for anonymity.

New / Old Site Content

The main purpose of this site is to provide an archive of old blog posts I wrote back when I was actually active in the library technology community and provide a link to a “portfolio” (term used very loosely) of past work.

I had some old sites of mine backed up, CSS I wrote for them, and various tutorials and presentations saved from previous jobs, but had to dig back through old folders to find them. Since I was basically continually on the job hunt between 2013 and 2017 even when I had a job I was pretty conscious of keeping copies of work things that I wrote/made that I could take with me when I left. Unfortunately there just isn’t that much “tangible” product I can show off when like 80% of my job was meetings and email (or that’s what it felt like). I really haven’t done anything over the past five years, there’s just a gaping hole there, so old stuff is all I’ve got.

I had to pick out a bunch of the old posts from a json file export from Ghost, which required converting the post dates from epoch and converting all the \n characters to actual newlines. And fix some Markdown and HTML formatting (I used to not put a space between the heading hash marks and the actual heading text…). But I didn’t actually read them all and left any typos or spelling mistakes as is.

I also dug up some links to things I wrote or were written about me on other sites and used Wayback to provide links to the actual old domain names I used to use. Wayback doesn’t have the whole content of the websites though, just the front pages. There are definitely projects I made or worked on that I don’t even remember.

Repurposed Theme Changes

I changed the colours to a different Radix colour scale, which occasioned some real irritation when I had white text on a colour background and it kept flagging Accessibility scans because it was less than 4:1 contrast. But it was an interactive element which should be allowed 3:1! But it isn’t an actual html button just a link so it gets flagged. But then if I’m claiming the site passes WCAG AA and somebody runs a scan on it and finds an error that looks bad. So in the end I had to change the colour to a darker one that looks objectively worse. But whatever. Now there are no errors.

I stripped out some aspects of the theme that aren’t necessary over there for the kind of posts I’m making, but I’ll probably end up putting it all back in. I am still me after all, and I do still hate the default code highlighting colours. :|

I used a similar post footer to the one on this site, but stripped out the last edited date because currency is not relevant when the post was written 10 years ago. I also removed all of the site footer links except the basic Bearblog one, mostly because I didn’t want the site to look too similar to this one. However the header and nav is basically the same.

I plan on copying some of Sylvia’s theme code again to figure out how to use embedded styles to make the front page look different from how the rest of the pages are styled – I want the heading/nav to float in the middle of the screen on the “home” page and then go up to the top on all the pages with content. I think that will make it look more like a “website” than a blog.

I might eventually put that version of the site theme up here but again that’s really crossing the streams. I have, though, “forked” it (I don’t use git, so sue me) and that theme is going to do some different things to serve a different purpose so maybe eventually it will be actually different enough to not draw immediate comparisons. Maybe I should say I was “inspired” by the An Archaeopteryx theme. lmao.

One idea that I got from it that I might bring back over here, though, is of making “fake” blog post lists. That is, if I have a list of links with some text about the link, I can put it into the div/ul structure that the site generates automatically when you use a post embed with descriptions. (This is one of those things I should make its own post about). Then you can make any dates use the i time span and make those dates look the same as other dates around the site. I don’t know if that will add confusion though, because then you won’t be able to distinguish what is likely an internal blog link and what is an off-site link. So then I’ll end up making something to indicate whether a link is internal or not… Yeah. We’ll see. This is how I end up with such an elaborate theme in the first place.

Job Hunting Trauma

Going back through all this stuff brings back a lot of memories. It’s kind of painful how optimistic I was about the industry back then. Or at least my future in general. I was really trying very hard to figure out how to function in a full time job in the industry and as it turned out maybe I shouldn’t have tried so hard at all. Job hunting is traumatic for me, I’ve spent most of my adult life either jobhunting or knowing I should be jobhunting but being too depressed to do it so feeling bad about myself. That’s why I haven’t worked or even thought about working for the past 5 years. But if I want to make it out of my current state of poverty I need to get a job. There isn’t any way around it.

I am definitely too afraid to try to be self-employed, every time I’ve even remotely tried to do side-hustle apps or start a newsletter or market myself online I’ve earned not a red cent. Somehow that’s even more depressing than sending out job applications that don’t get a reply. I’m pretty inured to that after all these years.

I mean, this blog has somewhere between 3 and 10 regular readers and I’m pretty sure I can guess who all of them are (hi! friends! thank you for reading!). The posts that are about bearblog theming get more, in the range of 10-50 (excluding the outlier of the Toast Button post which keeps getting more and more views somehow), but those spikes don’t translate into readers of all the rest of the stuff I write, let alone money. And that’s fine. But that’s why I’m doing it as a casual hobby, not trying to turn blogging about css into a money-maker. I don’t have the necessary irrational optimism that I will succeed.

I don’t even have any particular optimism that I will get the job that I made this site specifically for, but I’m going to keep working on it. You really never know what will make a difference and what is a waste of time.

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#bearblog #journal