This Wednesday, 14th May, at 09:00 UTC, a talk that I recorded for the online “WordSesh” conference. My talk is titled “Level Up! How Side Quests Enhance Your Career”.
If you found your way here after the talk then hooray! This worked. Below I have linked some resources from the talk, and suggested how you can send me feedback.
And if you found your way here without watching the talk, it’s available to watch for free, online, at wordsesh.com/recordings, until August 6th, with just an email address required to sign up.
Feedback
I’d love hear what you thought of the talk. You can do that in the WordSesh Slack workspace, or you can find me:
- On Mastodon: ross@crikey.social
- On Bluesky: @rosswintle.uk
- By email: ross@oikos.org.uk
Resources
Inspirational stuff
- Sara Joy’s talk “Whimsica11y: bringing the joy and whimsy to *everyone*” is excellent inspiration with an accessibility twist.
- Corey Maas did a WordCamp talk on one of his side projects that I also recommend. It’s just a lovely story.
- Josh W . Comeau has made some amazing courses and tutorials about bringing fun to websites. His latest site is inspiring in itself: Whimsical Animations
- Jack McDade also has an amazingly fun website, but has also made a course on “Radical Design” which has really helped me with my creativity.
- My own lightning talk “You Are Creative!” is another pep talk on creativity. Yes, a small part of this made its way into the WordSesh talk.
Tools and strategies for web-based side-projects
I mentioned using static sites on subdomains, and I have a manifesto for that kind of thing that explains some of it, and more details on how I make small static sites for free.
Other references
- Fathom Analytics (This is an affiliate link, but you will get $10 off your first invoice for using it)
- This article and podcast inspired me to be kind to my past self.
Finally, some of the things that I made…
…so that you can see how bad they really are. 😂
You will notice that I don’t always follow my own rules/ideas.
I HAVE deleted a bunch of stuff recently though. These all still exist and were referenced in the talk:
- My WordPress Browser Extension: Turbo Admin
- UK Government Petition Tracker
- caniphp.com – curated PHP features by version
- The Swindon Quiz – my first JavaScript/jQuery project
- Kownter – the blog about making my privacy-first analytics tool
- Some games I made (note that I use subdomains of “pico.games”
- Untitled Word Game (Explainer)
- A curious golf game
- Shuffleduck – An homage to a Taskmaster “final task” game
- Santa Factory – In a somewhat “meta” move, I made a Christmas themed cookie clicker in Pico8
- There’s a bunch of little web-based things I’ve made at veryuseful.app
- I made a free, web-based notes app that stores data in a local JSON file (Explainer)