That said, it's only a tentative plan. (Like all of my plans). Let me know via email or /guestbook if you'd rather I do what most people do and link random stuff. I'd be happy to do that...I'm not entirely sure why I didn't. It felt good to write my heart out for a bit, though. Very cathartic. I've been doing too much manual labor lately. On that highly related note, let me close out this post. Thanks for reading!
First, I've added more functionality to containers. You can now double click one to toggle its dragging mode (exactly what it sounds like). I wanted to make something smoother, perhaps even with the ondrag DOM event, but I made the right choice of good over perfect. Like anything, it's open for revisiting. You can also resize them—part of my endless crusade to satisfy my design philosophy, detailed in /about.
Oh yeah. I've added the about page! I'm not sure how close it is to finished. I didn't expect to write much at all and ended up pouring my heart out on just two limited and highly interconnected topics. At any rate, that means there's a lot of content there, including my [site design] philosophy.
Another page addition: /guestbook. I've already decided I won't whine about the process of creating it. Just know that I tried at least three completely different implementations, and a number of different approaches towards each. Now, most of the time was spent mashing my head on the keyboard because of an API that was fine via cURL but just had to fail via AJAX a 100,000,000 times!!! That out of the way, if you're going to take one lesson from this, let it be: I have a guestbook and it's structured how it needs to be to work.
Actually, scratch that. The lesson should be: you ought to leave me a message! (For real). Happy days.
While that's a great hook for this post, it may be too on the nose. The new invention is quite literal: a new computer. I've had tech trouble. Specifically, my previous SSD decided its time was up, having lived the unbearable eternity of around six months, and destroyed all of my data. To quote an email I sent to a friend shortly thereafter:
"This has been a lesson to me in making backups whenever I have anything irreplaceable not already backed up. That’s all the past can do for us: inform our present activity for the marginal betterment of the future."
However thoughtful that may sound, in the end it's basically a cope. I'm still coping over the loss of lots of materials of similar kind and quality to those in /pics and /writing. But the point of this post isn't (just) to whine about my situation. I want to apologize to you, whatever audience this site may have, if any, for my extended absence. To the best of my ability, I'll continue my site plan with renewed vigor.
And should something happen again, I'll fight more aggressively against my tendency to throw in the towel and leave things unfinished. I've had a few weeks to myself to stew. Now it's time to spend some time to myself to soup.
(up my site)
The rest of my time has gone into looking at how Neocities, and web design, works in general. That's meant coming across so many sites that have been built with so much love. I have more to say on this topic as well, but I appreciate everything I've seen and more is always welcome.
Anyway, I caved to internal pressure and redesigned my homepage in the center-pane and dual-sidebar style that seems ubiquitous on Neocities. I'll admit, it looks at least as good as before. And I think there's more room for growth than with my old design, which was already moving towards clutter. Now that my website's layout fits in better, maybe I could get some banners or gifs? Any and all help on that is appreciated.
From here on, I want to attempt a guestbook. I'm not willing to pay any money (I'm a broke cheapskate) so it may not be achievable. But I won't know until I try.
It's not much, but I also added a skeletal theme toggle. It doesn't transfer across pages (I'm still looking into whether that's even possible. If anyone has any ideas or experience, send me an email! I'm lonely over here :'{ ). More importantly I keep procrastinating /writing and /videos. That's the update there: I keep procrastinating, which will probably continue...
Update: I sunk more time into /pics, because why not? I've learned a lot about what code Neocities will allow, so my Javascript is tight as hell. But it took so much time...I guess the longterm results remain to be seen.
I have some ideas for /writing and /log. I also need to get a jump on /videos and /links, which probably represent a significantly higher ROI than everything I've done lately. We'll see what happens.
From here on, only worthwhile changes. Admittedly, this will overprivilege the early days: what can be more worthwhile than going from nothing to something? Anyway, to wrap up: I've added more pictures and some audio to /pics, a video to /videos, and more r a i n b o w t e x t to the navbar. Pain...
After about five hours I settled on a layout: the same staircase image in the background of every page, a top image-based navbar, a bottom p-tagged dedication, and a bad attitude.
Alright, not that bad an attitude. Returning in the afternoon I filled in /pics with five nature shots and added a rudimentary viewer. I also streamlined page loading and organized my writing.