The History of My Website

site v1-v1.5

this site was founded sometime around mid-late march of 2023 out of some form of boredom and motivation in my system for learning html. but i gave up quickly. i had some form of html knowledge...though it was only the basics, like heading and p tags, and while it isnt that helpful, pretty stacked bbcode knowledge. used 2 frequent this forum-rp website that i will not talk about. i think its dead now anyways...

i remember the first like 100 updates i made: the neocities coding tutorial only took me so far, and id already known basically everything it had to offer...and, as you know, it left off on a note that just said "google it". so i turned to a friend i had become aquianted with in my small experiences with html: w3schools. i decided id just...follow every tutorial from the beginning they had till i knew what to do (weird and bound 2 be proven useless & waste of time from the start). i skipped some of the first ones since they already had stuff i new about, then stopped at tables. following a w3schools tutorial on tables, i made a table and colored certain boxes in the table pink. then i tried to make a column layout, got confused (i was doing it wrong, i still didnt know how css worked, making it impossible to make a column layout) so i just gave up! (side not: gonna be honest, i still dont really know how tables work???? ive just never had to use them much for anything i guess)

im not sure when i decided to pick this site up again (from the records it seems like late may?), but its existance occupied a corner in my brain for a while till i decided to touch it again.

this time, i looked up a tutorial on column creation, and found the groundfloor layout tutorial. by this time i finally learned how to be smart and figured out how style tags worked (or i probably snooped in someone elses code to see how they added css) and...made a site! definitely was a site to behold.

the first page i made was what would become the albums page. my intention for this was a page to list my favorite albums in a "shelf-like" layout, then create passionate, custom subpages dedicated to each of them with their own layout, even longer rambles on my favorite songs, etc. i remember the first and only albums to be added there were jane removers fraility (so fucking good) and bladees icedancer. its a cute and cool idea, and maybe i'll return to it one day.

this background is from somewhere i forgot. all the gifs are from gifcities, marking my discovery of the best site ever, and all the grids and boxes were coded using the skeleton of the groundfloor code. in the video its broken, the album covers used to be lined up four by four, thats why theres so many of the fraility cover (i was using it as a placeholder). if only my idiot brain could comprehend flexbox back then, this wouldve been so much easier..

the only one i ever made a proper page for was icedancer. it was meant to look like the feelings i had when listening to it/the album cover: bubbly, bright, snow and aquatic related gifs, sparkly, bootleg-like quality, etc. etc. a marquee in celebration of learning about marquees, glittery headings generated from picason, a soundcloud embed of all the songs for ~easy playing~ and random background of snowflakes falling or something because it was the best one i could find.

and finally the homepage. this scrollthrough is not an authentic, ~first edition~ version like the rest of these captures are, not as well preserved from me removing the images from my server and them not saving because this is from codepen and not a site download, but its the most functioning version (aka you can actually decipher whats going on, older versions just completely broke and theres no point in capturing them. but if youre interested, the internet archive files are linked above)

i remember being so proud of this page, despite being aware of how god awful it looked at any other display ratio that wasnt the one i have. if i had only knew about the z-index attribute and adding width:000px into the body css to make it a bit more bareable...

that ebeng said. it was a fun idea with at least some stuff going for it. the header idea is cute, having butterflies and words come it, if not a bit laggy (but thats kind of a critism that could be levied at any of my (home)pages...) and was a solid execution of my vision. it passed my then expectations, so thats all i can ask for i guess ☺

ive talked about this a lot, youll probably see many references to this exact micro-story, but ths was a remake of a carrd i had. the carrds deleted too now, but just imagine this page but much worse. i had neocities on my mind while making that carrd. it was very unconventional. carrds, as you know, are just supposed to be a little hamburger of a site (though of course theres people who make them prettier and enhance them or whatever) but i wanted to make something that was more than that. i still didnt know how html worked, but i still wanted to make a site experiental and strange, so what i crafted was definitely that i guess!! but then shortly after making it, i was looking at other neocities sites and finally decided id give it another shot, and well, look where we are now i guess!!!!

site v2

very "anything goes", no particular theme, mish mosh of styles. the idea i wanted to capture in this was one which used many styles and "tropes", i guess, of other sites in neocities web, and combining them into one clusterfuck of a site. each element would be distinct from another, with its own styling, theme, color scheme, etc. etc. (this made the code 1000+ lines long and unbarely hard to code since i put the css and html all in the same file.) this was coded in like 5 days and while i like it a lot, its unorganized layout makes it very hard to not only edit, but not notice those gaping holes yet to be covered with content. its also just too bright on my eyes. color is good, and lots of organized, curated colors in specific areas, for sure, but combined with the background this was a lot to visually digest! also, so many gifs in that banner..so many gifs everywhere made my computer fan fucking roar.

i still like it a lot, and removing it was a lot on my heart. i had fun creating it, styling each of the elements, making them different and blessing each one with a theme and corresponding color scheme, etc.

site v3

uhhhh

preserving your own site

preserving your site is a very important part of running one! it captures the progress and effort youve put into it. it helps record it, however unimportant your site is, as a note in the history book. and while its not exactly mandatory, in an everchanging ecosystem like the world wide web, preservation and documentation will let your site live on, even if neocities goes down in flames dies like geocities did.

i didnt start archiving my site well until recently. thats why captures of early versions of my site are broken and largely unaccessable. however, ive learned ways to better save my site.

the most important thing you do is to upload it onto the wayback machine. make sure to check "save outlinks" (so it attempts to save all other pages attached to your website). other checkboxes are largely up to you. it may take a lot of time to upload, but especially if your sites complex as fuck like mine be patient about it (you may have to retry a few times). when its done, youll have a capture of your site in that point in time. updates you make to it after its been all uploaded (or maybe right after you upload the url for saving, im not sure) wont alter the capture. if you want to make a new save later in time, then youll have to upload the site url again to be downloaded again.

you can also use web archive to upload files of your site, or anything else you want preservation of, thats the point of the internet archive obviously haha.

another important thing you should do is to go to your neocities dashboard, scroll down, and click "download entire site". this will download a zip file with all the files that youve saved to your server. in my experience it breaks and is not perfect, but you have the raw html and css files so -b

you could also just copy and paste your page's html code onto a text file app such as textedit, the app that comes with the mac i use, and save it as a html file. i do this more as just a precaution and it doesnt archive much which is why i reccomend this as an extra step if you just wanna be save like me lol