Ollie Judge

Why Hello There.

It’s been a while…

I think this site has had at least twenty different iterations. From Wordpress to Ghost to HTML to back to Ghost again. This version though, it’s here to stay.

For those of you googling me for the first time. Hi, I’m Ollie, a producer that found his way to telling the stories I do in the strangest way possible. I’m endlessly curious in how to tell stories in new ways, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Experiments though are where I’ve found the things that have been fundemental to moving me forward as a producer.

So what is this site? - The content version

With the amount of different variations this site has taken on I wanted to make a bit more of a permanent log. Somewhere where I can share some of my work, a place that I can share half-baked ideas and most importantly my adventures in trying to nail a really good brisket.

It’s easy to let things you do pass you by, so I wanted to do a better job of documenting some of the stray ideas that eventually end up being something down the line. While at the time they seem silly (as much as they also do when you look back at them), it’s also important to take a look at how you got to a certain conclusion. This place is going to be an illustration of that process.

So what is this site - The techincal version

Right we’ve been through the looking glass and back with this place. I’ve done fancy themes, the latest blogging software and every mad javascript framework under the sun. I needed something that could stand the test of time and not have me endlessly tweaking settings so… without further ado I’d like to announce that I’m using…

Hugo.

I love Ghost, I really do but sometimes it can be really fiddly. Also for how infrequent I do anything on the site with any “kitchen sink” platform I end up having to update a hundred things every time I decide I’m interested in my personal site again.

For the theme I forked Devin Shulz’s Hugo theme which is brilliant and reigned in. It’s also very easy to understand. The site is hosted on Render. I can’t get my head around React and NPM gives me headaches. So here we go, good old markdown and HTML. It works and looks nice.

How often are you going to update this place?

The truth is… sometimes. A well kept independent blog tends to be one of the most interesting places on the internet. I’ll try but I can’t promise I’m going to always keep this up to date. For what it’s worth though, this will be the site going forward, it will be updated and won’t be wiped mainly because I’d like to see my own progression moving forward.

If you’re not going to be visiting all the often but would like to keep an eye out for anything that does pop up you can follow me on Twitter or kick it old school and subscribe to the RSS feed below.

Catch you soon…ish.