Linux-Studio.com is now LinuxCreative.com!

Hi friends! It’s Wesley. As you may know, I started Linux-Studio.com over 5 years ago to support my hobby YouTube channel with some more content. Another 5 years prior to that was my foray into using Linux as a desktop operating system. Things have come a long way since both of these major milestones, and as such, it makes sense to rebrand this outlet as LinuxCreative.com

Why Change?

While my ambitions for Linux-Studio.com were grand, the execution went poorly for a few reasons.

1. I’m more curious than smart

Having very little knowledge of maintaining a website, I rushed to find the most minimal solution I could to build the site. The first iteration of Linux-Studio.com was built using MetalSmith, which is a really cool static site generator, but I found after about a year, things started to break, due to my modular build environment falling apart at the seams. I don’t blame the MetalSmith project for that. I hacked the site together in a weekend without much knowledge of what I was actually doing. Moreover, I was not able to get my hosting provider’s deployment system to automatically build the site on each GIT push, so I would have to do a local build with each website update, further cementing the eventual doom of this approach.

2. Enter HUGO

About a year ago, I started very obsessively learning to use HUGO. I have since built multiple sites using this blazing fast static site generator, and I have come to the opinion that for me, if I can’t build it with HUGO, I should just resign to a WordPress site. (By the way, if you are currently maintaining a WordPress website, you should really check out DigitalOcean).

Eventually, I ported the entire Linux-Studio.com website over to HUGO, which took me another long weekend. I added a few enhancements to modernize the semantics of the site, but largely, things stayed the same as they were when I first designed it.

3. SEO: The Elephant in the Room

While I have a complicated relationship with entities such as Google, I accept that the way people find the information they are looking for these days relies heavily on our corporate overlords. If and when that changes, I’ll be relieved, but I don’t expect it. My continued commercial work on websites led me down the path of learning more about SEO and optimizing the websites I own and operate.

Linux-Studio.com got several small updates for accessibility, rich results with structured data, elimination of some old redirect links, and much more. I spent significant effort trying to get the content I had already worked to produce in front of the people that would likely enjoy it, but at the end of the day, I was fighting an uphill battle. Linux-Studio.com was doomed from the start because it’s a URL with a hyphen in it, and it was competing with both the Ubuntu Studio project, and multiple other cloud / container solution providers. I went back to the drawing board and decided very deliberately that LinuxCreative.com would be more suitable for the content on this site, then set out designing the terminal software and pixel art inspired website.

The Logo

If you were to right-click on the logo at the top left of this website, then click “Open image in new tab”, you’d likely realize that the LinuxCreative.com logo is just 76x38 pixels in size and clocks in around a half a kilobyte. I consider this tiny raster graphic a giant middle finger aimed at the state of online marketing. I see so many horrible logos plastered all over the internet in sizes way larger than what could ever be considered necessary. Also, I just think this little pixel art is cool. I hope you do too! If you decide to use the logo on your own work anywhere, please respect the pixels! Make sure you do any scaling of this image without antialiasing turned on, and scale it in whole integer multiples of its original size of just 76x38.

The Future of LinuxCreative.com

I’ll continue to add content to this website and videos to the YouTube channel. Content will be strictly focused on using desktop Linux for any creative discipline. As a full-time desktop Linux user for the last decade, as well as a digital marketing professional, I hope to inspire others to check out the incredible flexibility and capability of the tools now available on Linux.

Thank you for your continued support as I share my passion!

Cheers,
Wesley