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ABOUT WEBSITE.

On this website, you can find almost everything I do on the Internet: patch notes, articles, blog posts and more. I want to cover the reasons why it was created, what influenced it, and how it has made my life a little bit better.

I created this website in January 2024. At that moment, I hadn't used social media for 5-6 months or so. I didn't know much about the small web and all related things then, but I knew that it would be cool to have a place where I can store my music and thoughts. I had some experience with basic HTML from school, but didn't remember anything at all, so I started surfing HTML and CSS guides, and after a few weeks, the first version of this site was created. One cool thing: I archived each version because they are very light, and it's really interesting to look at how it changed over time! Maybe I'll make a dedicated page with screenshots in the future.

All versions were built with layout generators, and I'm pretty happy with this decision because I learned a lot of stuff. Some credits:

During the search for such tools and guides, I found Neocities for the first time and spent a few days in a row surfing this newly discovered world of outstanding web-people who were handcrafting their own worlds. These worlds were so creative and different from what I'd seen before, I was shocked that I had never heard of this before! And it was just the tip of the iceberg. Really, right now it feels like I found a lost civilization or a parallel universe back then. It made me think that I want my own website to be not just a landing page or blog, but something special that would feel like home to me and give other people a better understanding of what kind of person I am.

That was happening during the time when I was preparing to move to another town, so I set this idea aside and started to do necessary adult stuff, sadly! But during these few months, I was exploring this new web further, constantly finding cool people and diving deeper into this rabbit hole. I found ORCA and Hundred Rabbits, and it was another big step towards RSS, IRC, and other cool technologies, which I had never used before. To be honest, Devine Lu Linvega and Rek Bell were the biggest discoveries of this year, and I highly recommend checking out their websites and all the cool stuff they do! The most surprising thing was that this whole web exploration shifted my mindset, and I finally understood that there were a lot of people with values similar to mine, but I simply never knew how and where to find them. It was amazing because, for the last few years, I felt really lost and disoriented.

In the early summer of 2024, I started moving towards the goal and quickly understood that I need some kind of restrictions and guidelines in this process because I was stuck in an endless loop, constantly tweaking the CSS file and restructuring pages. I decided that I needed to understand what the purpose of my site was and what the main elements were. Here's the list of things that I came up with:

  • It should be fast, clean, and distraction-free
  • It should be accessible and easy to navigate
  • It should be text-based because I want to practice my English
  • It should have simple CSS (with a permanent style guide)
  • It should be aesthetically pleasing to me, with a touch of tech or old-school style

So, I started working on a style-guide and structure rules:

  • Font: Pixel Operator (I really wanted to use a monospace font, but it was kinda hard to read, so I decided to use something stylistically similar, but with more comfortable spacing. I know that it's also not easy on the eyes, but I really like the aesthetic)
  • Theme change: I think the possibility to toggle between dark and light modes is really important for readability, so there's one JS file for the whole site that controls theme change, everything else is HTML and CSS.
  • Top bar: I found it useful to keep short important info there, for example, the date of the last update, theme toggle button, important links and the title of the website.
  • Navigation panel: The first version had a navigation bar at the top, but I found the side panel much more convenient because I can always pin something useful there (a new article or new tab group, for example), and it won't break anything because there's plenty of vertical space. I also made it "sticky" later, so you can use it from any part of the page.

Right now, I'm pretty happy with the results and will try to keep things that way for some time and spend more time writing and not fine-tuning stuff! You can find websites and people that inspired me in the web places section.

One more thing that surprised me during this process was that I started to get things done. I think the main reason was that I structured all my thoughts, projects, and energy in one place, and it somehow pulled me out of the procrastination loop. I naturally tend to drop things halfway through, but this time I managed to deeply understand how small consistent steps should work, and now it feels more natural for me to do something every day, little by little, and not rush projects in excitement. I finally have time to learn things that I wanted to learn for a long time, which feels great. It sounds like this could be done with just notes, but there's a big difference. With a website, it's public, so you are thinking about how to make things clear for other people (similar to the learning process: your brain can't just pretend that it understands some stuff; you need to really understand it to be able to explain it to another person), and also you can interconnect all the notes, which is useful too. If you have a similar problem, give it a try; maybe it'll help you too, who knows!

That's all for now, but I'll cover some of these things more in detail in my article about the modern web if you're interested. Also, if you've found any mistakes or broken links, please let me know. I'll fix them as soon as I can. Feel free to write to me on Telegram or email if you want to chat, or if you have a cool website and want me to add it to my links section!

Thanks for reading!