Honestly this is pretty late for me to be composing a blog entry of all things. Whatever, I got something to say, and it's about my neosite.
After making about 3 new stylesheets in CSS for each subpage that I have (MsgWall, About, and the main), I've impressed myself with what I was able to assemble. I looked at my about page layout and something about it just seemed so wicked to witness something that oozed style. There's been 3 ages of this site so far...
The era right after Fishy convinced me to at least give it some time. Maybe I would stick to it, or maybe I would tire after the 2 week novelty wore off. Elements weren't organized and generally speaking were a bunch of HTML notes and exercises sporadically splayed on my makin page. I wanted to put in some gradients in my textbox, but I didn't have the experience (nor the patience) to pull that off yet. I plastered in my OS background that I made for myself a couple years back, and made the first of my blog entries on one big subpage. The embers were barely heating up, but I came in with the expectation that I was pretty much starting to learn another coding language, HTML (again) and CSS. Manually getting the element boxes to center align all hackedly was the point that I would say began the next era.
Having a bunch of cool gradients and borders housing a bunch of work in progress text was a welcome start from the blank page blues that I had back in 2K25, but it was definitely babby's first page. Eventually, I started to tinker with CSS. At this point I went over to W3Schools to learn some great element ideas, since staring at the documentation was like learning how to assemble my own blank canvas from scratch, starting with the manufacturing of the frame fasteners. Every edit I did was theoretical, and you bet that I did the shift + refresh thing on my website constantly to see if it didn't blow up. Little by little, I'd start to make it fancy. Let's put a Navbar in there, and let the banner be an image instead of text (Apologies if people are irked by how big it was)! Also, convert the message wall to a hub where micropages with the bare minimum are instead opened via iframe. But have the navigation for that be a bunch of links that open to it instead.
Around this time I started to have a little bit of doubt for myself. I would never compare to the other notable websites, with many eyeballs witnessing it, with tighter HTML, CSS, and other script goodies that kept the User entertained. All I had to stick to the internet fridge was my attempt of centering my page in a frankly frankensteinly manner. I bruised my self-confidence for a while until I finally came to the conclusion that remedied my problem.
I did this for fun, not for a bag, nor for clout. While other people may be busy husling their socks off to make their creative project come true, people like me come in and try to get comfy, maybe talk to one another. Also, audio file playing and storage is from supporters that funded Neocities, so clearly they find it worth to chip in and get a couple perks. Also, there is no such thing as a perfect website, it's going to be a load of hopes and a LOT of duct taped solutions making it run. That whisked away all the worries I had. As long as I manage to reach the goals I set for myself, and am proud to let any old Joe/Jane/Jay be able to look at my work, then that was the dream.
Every time I launched NeoCities, I would try to put something cool that I gleamed from another website, or from the examples that I saw at W3Schools. Sometimes it would be a massive success, and other times I would be butting my head against the wall trying to make it work (Read: The time I failed to implement 3D animated CSS). Ignore the searchbar that NeoCities gives, since I have a feeling that they would recc the big viewed ones anyway, go for global activity and spy for some good sites. Every site is a reflection of the owner, and the intriegue of learning what they wish to tell the world about themselves is palpable. Then I would get clocked upside the head with an unblocked online game site. Anything to justify a chromebook as something other than a lame chromium school craptop.
Obviously, I'm still not that big on trying to streak my presence on this site (nor the internet in general), I don't even have a webring or someone's sticker hosted on the site. Maybe it's me, but I guess it's easy to lose track of the personal part of socially interacting. It's not about how many mutual relationships that form out of shallow handshakes, it's about the people that really 'get' it, ones that do the things that they say, or the humor of the people who can stand to recognize how absurd it is that people are concerned with keeping their social popularity number up. Alternatively, it's the DO NOTS that keep me humble. The internet can choose to immortalize you forever, just not the moment you thought it would be. I'm not the brat on deviantart making MSpaint temper tantrums, and spending money to artificially get people to pay attention to me. The embarassment would be enough to knock my brain out.
Sorry, tangent, but the lesson there was to keep learning, not compare my progress to those with immaculate talent in website making, and to have a little fun with it. If people genuinely like what I throw down, then that's cool. If not, then it's cool, not everything has to be the talk of the town because I just fixed one indent. That has brought me to what I am hazily calling...
I hit a ceiling with what I wanted to put on my website, and I was not going to conver my entire folder of amateur art into a gallery onto here. I instead to choose the route of theming each subpage individually. This also meant that I made the 'sandbox', a subpage where I can mess around with whatever I wanted to implement without hindering any unfortunate guests that might've been viewing my website at that time. Keep in mind that I try to at least keep my notes in the document, so hit F12 and don't be afraid to identify and play with my webpages guts. Now I can manually adjust one element to see if it'll fit or if it would just wipe my organization to shreds. An entire website revamp would be possible, but I don't really see the purpose in it if it's still going to be me typing my thoughts out and maybe trying to implement my hobby/art somewhere in here. What am I, some sort of webcomic artist?
Lotta words, and this took me an hour to pound out. All in the NeoCities text editor too, mind you. I'll snag a backup eventually, but to try to streamline my website to a professional degree sounds like overkill. It would make implementation faster, sure, but I just want to make everything bubbly and scenic just because.
Anyway, another entry down. If you read this, type out 'Braille made epic Fails' on my profile. Or don't, because that would be silly. I don't put a guestbook in because I know moderating it would be a full time job with no pay.