About the site name
Every ADHDer has said ‘What was I doing again?’ to themselves. I say it to myself multiple times a day, but usually in a less family friendly manner that would not make for a great site or domain name 😆
About me
My name is Arp. I’m an Adult ADHDer, having been diagnosed at 49.
At first it was cool because everything in my life finally made sense, but over time I realized that so many things I’d wanted to do were not truly possible for me. But barely 3 months after diagnosis, we moved from Florida to North Carolina. With learning about a new place and trying to attend to the needs of my wife & 4 kids, I didn’t have time to process or grieve.
Now that it’s been almost a year in North Carolina, things are slowing down a bit and thus I got the idea to have an old school blog (this was greatly aided by ditching the birdsite for Mastodon and thinking about how giant companies ruined the promise of the web). Since reading about other people’s experiences with adhd have been profoundly helpful for me, I thought blogging might be a good way to process and hopefully help someone else out.
More about me
Strengths |
|
|---|---|
| Hyperfocus | Time blindness1 |
| Creative Thinker & Problem Solver | Goes down rabbitholes easily |
| Super high energy when sharing passions & interests | Gets bored easily |
| Self-reliant | Impatient with others |
| Sense of humor | Bad at being 'serious' |
| Badass long term memory2 | Short term memory is sketchy af |
| Excellent powers of observation | Gets hung up on details |
| Deep thinker | Live in my own head a lot |
| Carvel ice cream cake | |
| Lemon squares3 | |
| Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs | |
| Orange snack foods4 |
Regular boring About page facts
I’m Indian-American, 50, married with 4 kids, 2 cats, a dog, and a birb (though the birb is technically owned by one of the kids). I live in Durham, North Carolina, make a living with website-related activities, and enjoy reading & making comics, storytelling in all its forms, the great outdoors, futbol (which is life), and hard kombucha.
About the site
It’s an old school blog
And by ‘old school,’ I mean the site is meant to be read as a blog first, with categories, subcategories, and tags to organize everything. That’s why there are categories in the nav and the sidebar, along with a tag cloud (something that hasn’t been in vogue in well over a decade).
I’m also bringing back Post Formats
Post Formats are a way to define what kind of post a post is. They’re like categories, but the purpose was to add, remove, or style things that were specific to post content. If I’m posting a photo or video, maybe a title and description are unnecessary. Or if I’m posting a quote, than the title & the rest aren’t necessary at all.
This idea started with Matt Mullenweg5 in 2004 when he created the concept of asides after seeing a couple of sites just posting links instead of complete blog posts. He wanted to share a simple thought quickly without writing a title and voila: the post format was born.
What killed post formats was SEO, and people wanting to appease Google with proper page titles (with keywords) and at least 250-300 words. To a lesser extent, it became easier to add videos and photos to posts too.
You know where you’ve seen post formats used heavily? Tumblr. They work so well there (still) that I figured it’s worth trying, so I’ll be adding little icons in the post footers to indicate what kind of post it is.
But I have special styling for blog posts.
Just to make sure that the blog posts stand out amongst the stream of latest posts, I’ve done a couple of things:
- The most recent blog post will always be sticky at the top of the home page.
- Blog posts are styled differently in the stream of posts, with a green post footer and some green shadow to lift the post off the page a bit.
In progress: joining the #Fediverse
If you have a #Mastodon account, you will be able to follow the blog with your Mastodon account soon6. Then you’ll get toots whenever there’s a new post!
You can also comment on a post from your own site or social media account.7
(If the above is Greek to you, don’t worry about it.)
Lastly: this ‘adhd’ font
The idea of finding a font that captured or felt like ADHD popped into my head while building the site, which sent me on a short rabbithole of looking at handwriting styled Google fonts. This one, called Dokdo, jumped out at me.
Dokdo has a sort of ‘all over the place’ feel, with the letters not perfectly lined up. It’s got an analog, handwritten feel too, which makes me think a little of my beloved comics & graphic novels. It’s not the easiest to read (which is why it’s not visible on phones) but it fits.
- I was ALWAYS late as a teen, but I had chalked it up to Indian Standard Time [↩]
- often limited to weird facts and quotes [↩]
- homemade only, no confectioner's sugar needed [↩]
- cheddar & sour cream potato chips, crunchy Cheetos, Doritos, etc. [↩]
- WordPress’ creator [↩]
- ie as soon as I figure out why it’s not working [↩]
- I haven’t tested this yet. [↩]
