Hideoworks Blog

You're reading hideoworks Blog, and this is our first post! Now, despite our most content is livestream and other audio-visual based media, reaching the text-based media was not part of our focus at all at first. The name hideo derived as a pun from the word 'video' afterall, why the sudden change?

In reality, the change wasn't so sudden. We've been obsessed to have our website up and running since forever. Started as a link-based minisite hosted by S.ID (kinda like Linktree), then moved to Canva that's essentially a PPTX but host it as website, then to where we are today. So if you're not new to what we did, it kinda an expected pipeline.

Our Journey

However, our obsession is not without reasons. hideoworks from the get go is an experiment. It's a testbench, as we are working professionally in media industry, with the nature of media being fast-paced. The problem with that is, we tend to make whatever and uploading it wherever. Which if you're part of our crewmates or follower, that's not very convenient, is it? So, it stems as a solution to compile what we create over the past years.

That's why at first, link-based minisite works. It compile links of where people on the internet could find us. Problem solved, right? Well, not really. both S.ID and Linktree are easy to set up, but they're also limited as well. No shade to them, it is their nature of a platform. Which to us who likes to tinker around, is not very nice.

By the time we're working for certain startup, we have extra Canva account. Naturally, we'd play around and apparently they can host a website with custom domain! Without hesitation, we tried it and it works quite nicely. More customization, and for what it's worth you also have quite a competent photo editor (especially with recent Affinity release), with stock video, images, sound and music available anytime.

But, because the site is essentially like a Google Slides with web domain to access it, it works well as a static site. But it prone to be very heavy, sites are quite long to load, because there're lots of graphics like images and videos that are not compressed. And while it is more customizable, there are times where I want to just dive to the source code to change certain things, which It would not let you. Lastly, despite the price I mentioned as worth it, it's still quite expensive, and majority of our time at the moment does not need the service that Canva offers. So, we migrate once again.

At this point of time, we thought maybe it's time to bite the bullet and actually learn webdev once again after dropping our online course in the 2020. We also discovered web hosting is now very affordable, as local server costs as cheap as $1.5 USD per month. And thus, by the time we have the time we finally got to work.

Through a painful, but quite fun, 4 days of staring at VSCode and reading MDN back and forth. We did it. We made a static site at hideoworks.my.id. And we learned more than what we get thought in a course, learning by doing the entire case. Which, in a way, is back to our nature of the project being experimental, and I could add whatever as I pleased! Embed of other platform? Gotcha! Blog platform? Just gotta build it! I'm more fulfilled with this project than any of the site we were on previously. And hopefully we're here staying for good this time.

Reflection

Honestly, writing this is quite nostalgic. We like writing non-fictional piece since long time. We did worked as journalist before, compiling data to research and write some news article to publish! And despite the painful thesis writing phase, doing research and writing it down never gets old. So, this blog will serves it's purpose as our extension of thoughts. We hope you look forward to it. Thank you and have a great one, see you on the next piece.