Some Questions
I felt like throwing something up here for some introspection. Cause honestly I never thought I would be writing my own website one day and that's really surreal to me. The whole journey to making my site brings up a series of memories and factors in my mind that i think might be interesting. So if you want to dive down that rabbit hole buckle in i guess, either way I'm gonna write about this because I want to process my experience. So, getting started, I'm not gonna pretend someone else asked me these questions, so they're all from my POV. This was going to be a part of my About / site origin page, but I think it works fine as a journal entry.
I started coding this in 2021.
It's been a few years now. It's been tough, I've learned enough to get comfortable. It's become a fun creative outlet that's led me to finding new ways to display my art and stories through a landscape of graphics and Hyper Text. That's kind of my main goal for this website- aside from building my own confidence from creating it. There is another benefit though, the independence and freedom from I gain here away from social media.
Now that I have an RSS Feed, that feels pretty incredible. I thought for the longest time that would be like pushing a boulder up a hill, but when I sat down and read about how to code one, I just... wondered why I thought it would be so hard. I thought I needed a tool to make one for me, but I could just write it myself. This is a facet of why it sucks to learn stuff on your own sometimes, I never got a basic tutorial on how to code. A lot of my experience was picking a corner of a mountain and chipping away at it. And that took the form of smashing F12 and studying other people's code, copying it into my own editor and seeing what made it work and fail. Then I had to code my own which hooooboi was hard. But fun.
One thing I wish I'd done sooner was create color variant tags in the CSS so that I could change elements less tediously than scanning through my css. I didn't know I could just keep all my colors neatly at the top of my CSS where I could compare them. See if they matched well more easily. And tell some elements to use the same colors for theme unity. If I wanted different colors sometimes i could just create another pallette. I could create a theme switcher, which is a goal I'm working towards. I still have a long way to go, my css looks really complicated. Getting there though.
Honestly no. I don't think I felt like I was smart enough to learn it. I wish I didn't underestimate myself about so many things.
I remember in my school days when i saw coding for dummies books in the hands of students taking calculus. I thought it was like a secret language I'd never be able to learn. Which was really frustrating. I knew how to read. I read a lot. (I reviewed books at one point in time for my school libraries and recommended books often. I hope others enjoyed those books.)
But there was a wall between me and math, and anything that looked too complicated and I knew nothing about from a glance. No one could give me a basic class about what coding actually was to disolve my fear and I wish someone had so I could have started sooner.
I struggled and failed so many math classes because I found out AFTER school that I had dyscalculia and ADHD that my parents ignored. They didn't think it really impacted me, but didn't know how it manifested. I forgive them for not knowing better, they were going through a lot. But I hate how this has impacted my life. I needed help the entire time. Tools to make it easier for me. I suffered in silence. I struggled in school. I was bad at some things and didn't know why and i just accepted that I couldn't help it. Coding was another reminder of this feeling that I just couldn't do some things.
I saw code and I told myself eh its not really my thing, I just write books. Oh the irony. The reason why I'm creating this site now is because I write stories and wanted a place to put them that I'm in control of. Publishing physical media is really fucking hard and I don't want a publisher to screw me over and tell me what I can and can't do with my own story. Maybe it too is something that I just need to study more on. But its really far away from me right now. I'm just upset I didn't know what freedoms coding could give me. I had to stumble across that for myself by chance, and I don't even really remember what that exact moment was. Maybe it was just gradual. Maybe it was Deviantart profiles. Maybe I just got mad one day that I saw other people making cool things, and wanted to do something myself. I could figure this out. And I have.
Weird to think making this almost didn't even happen- if I wasn't cursed to obsessively ponder upon things enough to come back. When i started this i had no idea how to put HTML and CSS together. I got frustrated, got overwhelmed, left, ranted about how frustrated i was- came back determined to make things look nice, and gradually... I got things working. There are so many resources here on neocities and the web to learn site development. I'm just piecing together advice here and there and trying to troubleshoot as i come across new problems. Nothing like hands on experience and falling on alot of legos to learn anything, right? Haha! *sobs while holding my toes*.
Design Journey
I'll throw in some screen shots here. A few themes haven't even launched. I really like some but need to remake for my current theme... alright, I spruced up the choco mint chip. This was my first theme before I started my Star themed one. It's a much simpler theme to edit, but cute. It is nostalgic a bit looking over it and working on it again. I've come a long way. I'm able to use information I've gained and commit an idea and create it without needing to google so much.
Am I happy with how this looks?
I'm really happy with what I've learned and how far I've come towards making this site. I wasn't very sure how i wanted my site to look at first, but i did want it to be simple. Trying to do anything complicated always led me to feeling frustrated or too indecisive. I'd spend hours working on one thing only to realize i hated it and delete it. What i learned from those experiences though was that I just wanted to know if i could do what i set out to do. I'll be satisfied with that, and discard it. I think what i need from this site is a simple structure that is easy to maintain or change- with the fewest amount of distractions as possible. This pushed my decision not to use javascript for a header and navigation. I'd rather each page have a simple link at the top to whatever previous file was most relevant. I am debating on adding a site map though.
As far as the CSS goes, I like the "Chocolate Mint Chip" theme. I've always loved turquoise and brown, and the backdrop photo suits those really well. It feels earthly, wandering, and creative. My space theme is more inclined towards inward worlds, or personal ideas. It is slightly adapted from the choco-mint theme. As a template, at its base, it is a simple box with color fields and a faded background of any other choice. I think I'll continue to use this, as it keeps a visual similarity across all my pages, while at the same time offering some change in mood. It is clean, and not too busy.