I’ve finally finished making my new website, superseding both my previous version of tempusware.com and TempusWare: The Archive. This time around, I used Jekyll – a static site generator to help generate the various pages as opposed to manually writing html documents for every page.
For the new site, I wanted to both present an archive of all my past videos and the new direction of my recent content (i.e. my short films). I was able to recycle the dataset lists of URL IDs, titles, and dates that I put together for The Archive, which compiled various videos distributed across my multiple YouTube channels. I converted it from JSON (used by React for The Archive) to CSV (to display the full list as a table in Excel).
A problem I had with The Archive was how bland its design was; I had just learned how to use Bootstrap and wanted to practice using it. For this site, I wanted to display thumbnails for every video, so I used batch scripts to take the YouTube video IDs from the CSV, download the respective thumbnails, and resize the images to 1280×720 with ffmpeg (for thumbnails that weren’t originally in 16:9 aspect ratio). It took some trial and error to resize the image; Rather than stretch the image or have black bars, I wanted to maintain the aspect ratio of the original video, but blur the sides to fit in 16:9.
My goal was to memorialise all the various projects I’ve worked on over the course of the past decade and a bit, and create the definitive website for my ‘portfolio’ of work (or ‘accumulation’ at least; ‘portfolio’ sounds too formal for most of the stuff I’ve made). Officially, the TempusWare YouTube channel turns 10 years old this October 31st, though I’d made content in the years before under different names and channels. I’ve always struggled with being too embarrassed to show people my work, especially my past projects that revolve around Club Penguin or Minecraft. I feel like I’ll soon shed the identity of TempusWare and go by my real name, but not just yet.