Enya's Website

Hello World! - Birth of this Website (Why? How? & more)

2023-03-28

Yoooo, I got this new website up and running. There's so much to talk about! Why I changed sites, what I'm using, what sorts of things I want to do, all that jazz.

Why another new site? Don't I already have 2 previous sites?

Friends who know me and my brief website escapades probably know that I already have two websites, AnticarCatgirl.neocities.org which was abandoned and enya.codeberg.page which will likely be abandoned once this website reaches a comparable point of personal satisfaction. So it's pretty fair to ask why I would go on to make another site again. I think the main reason is wanting to switch up tools and start from scratch. That seems very fitting for an ADHD person such as myself to be like "ooo, shiny new toy, let's start a new project instead of continuing what I have", but like, I've hardly gotten started with this website and there's already things I like a lot more, so idk, maybe this will actually be the special one to stick around, only time will tell. In any case, I am very excited about this new website and how I will improve things over my previous sites.

Show me the tech tools!

I know some of y'all are just waiting for me to talk tech, this is for you. I will hopefully have a more complete "about website" section in the future but here's the big stuff that I know I'm using here and now.
Roll call please:

  • Zola (Static Site Generator)
  • Tera (Template Engine that Zola uses)
  • Neocities (Web Host with fun other things)
  • Neocities CLI tool (Neocities + power of CLI muwahaha)
  • Codeberg (Git host)
  • the basic programmer tools (editor, terminal, git)

I also have more to say about a couple of these.

Zola

The most important tool that I want to mention is Zola, switching from my previous SSG was the main reason for starting a new site. I had previously picked Franklin.jl in hopes of using it to learn a little Julia, but truth be told that you don't learn much of the language for the SSG you choose, or at least, I didn't. I went back to Jamstack to check what other SSG's there were. I knew I wanted to be a little hipster and not choose a popular option like Jekyll or Hugo, but I also shouldn't choose the most esoteric option either. I know Github stars shouldn't be the ultimate metric for measuring a piece of software being "better" or more popular than another (I mean hey, I literally just got done saying I didn't want a popular option), but I figured that Zola having more than 10 times the amount of stars that Franklin.jl has means something and so we rolled with it. Setting up Zola was nice because it was just like installing a program, I felt like it was a lot more intuitive than like setting up a Julia project with Franklin. The getting started page of Zola got me setup pretty easily with a basic blog and no theme. Not picking a theme when I did last time with Franklin was actually an explicit choice, I wanted to learn more and do my own stuff anyways, and I think that worked out because I already feel like I understand Zola more than Franklin. I think there was probably more to the thought process of picking Zola than just that, but I think that hits some highlights. Hopefully this doesn't seem like bashing on Franklin too much, but that's the SSG experience I have to compare to.

Neocities & Codeberg

I uhhh, notably moved from Neocities to Codeberg pages and back to Neocities. Codeberg pages worked and made sense given that I was putting the source code on Codeberg with the 2nd website, but I didn't know about Neocities CLI tool and like some of the ideas on Neocities. Neocities feels like it's not just a free website host, it's a social network of people who make their own personal websites, and I think that's really cool! Given that the build output of my SSG doesn't really need to be under source control, the Neocities CLI tool makes working with Neocities a lot easier, Neocities has cute social features, and the uniqueness of Neocities idea of being a network of websites is something I'd like to support, it made a lot of sense to me to go back to Neocities. A basic hosting service like Codeberg pages, Github pages, Netlify, etc, can be a decent house for projects, but Neocities is a home, and that's what I want for a personal blog. I'll still put my source code on Codeberg, it's still a git host that's not Github and I want my code under source control and get nice things like an issue tracker, but this site will be hosted with Neocities. In the future when I actually have income, I'll have to upgrade to supporter on Neocities.

What's Next?

Okay, so I talked about how I got to where I'm at now, but what about what's next now that I have all this?

Catching Up to the Previous Site

At the time of writing this, there are still ways that this site is behind my codeberg page. I need to reach parity with my previous website before I start putting this one in my bio's and directing people towards it. These will probably mostly be organized as Codeberg issues so I won't talk about them in depth here, but here's some of the things I need to do to catch up:

  • Add links to socials
  • Add bio stuff including queer & plural stuff
  • (Ideally) Add OpenMoji
  • (Ideally) Make website responsive (look good on mobile)
  • Probably work on making styling a little better
  • Add a Favicon

Future & Beyond

Once I'm all caught up with the previous website, that's where the fun will begin. I have plenty of ideas I want to make happen to this site, here's some I can think of:

  • Style the main content and sidebar to look like cute floating windows.
  • Learn more about website accessibility beyond just adding alt text.
  • Add Atom/RSS feeds.
  • Maybe add a fun font and have a font changer setup so you can choose between more fun and more readable.
  • Maybe add like a guestbook or comment-section-like thing.
  • Get some of those nifty retro badges and stick 'em on my site.
  • Maybe join a Webring once I'm a bit more established.
  • Start doing other projects that give me something to talk about on my blog.
  • Maybe look into tools or methods to write blog posts that are more clear/concise or fun.
  • Look at other Neocities sites to get ideas and actually use Neocities unique social stuff.
  • Maybe look into sprucing up the place with artwork.
  • Maybe play around with JavaScript stuff.
  • Maybe add custom emojis to this site.

Final Words

I feel like I'm at the end of a YouTube video and have to say "signing off" or something. Maybe I need to add a signature like it's a letter or an email. If you read all or even just part of this post, thank you <3. Lemme know what you think about after reading this.

With Lots of Love,
Enya🔥