Addition by subtraction

If decluttering has taught me something it is that sometimes less really is more. And that is true not only for material possessions but for pretty much every aspect of our lives. Think about it: there aren't that many things you need more of.

I started the new year thinking about new ways to apply this mindset and one aspect that could use some decluttering is my digital projects. So I asked myself, what could I remove from my side projects in order to make them better?

One obvious answer was to remove some of the projects from the web entirely. And that's why I did. As of today, only this blog and my thegallery.io are currently online.

Everything else has either been deleted, archived or redirected here. This will free some of my time and attention and also save some money, and that's always good.

The other less obvious action was to remove something from The Gallery.

The Gallery 2019 Edition

I was doing some maintenance work on the site and I decided to get rid of the search. Why? Because why not? The search engine itself is still there, you can still search across the site but the search form is now gone.

I never used it anyway, and if I need something I use Alfred on my Mac to search on the site. Plus, this means one less JS library I need to load on the site and that's a good thing.

Another thing I'm going to remove is the current Twitter Feed. The feed has been there since day one and at first it was manually updated along with a bunch of other social media channels. I dropped all the other accounts one by one and Twitter was the only one left. It survived mostly because it was generated automatically.

Now you're probably thinking, why don't I just leave it there then? And the answer is simple: because I don't want to add to the noise of your life. I know, it's not up to me to decide what's considered noise and what not but still, I don't want to take part in that game.

I'm not going to delete it, I'll leave it up mostly as an archive. The Gallery will continue on as usual, you can still visit the site and there's still an RSS feed available (which right now is broken for some reason and I'm in the process of fixing it).

As always, if you have thoughts on the matter, shoot me an email. Always happy to engage in conversations.