Apr 22, 2026: Massive overhaul to the site layout!!

It's been a while since I had a blog update! I've actually only ever made one blog post on this site, like two and a half years ago (before I had upgraded to the 50GB supporter tier of NeoCities, and couldn't include many pictures). I made this website in 2023, played with it for maybe a total of 15 hours over a month or so, and then got so busy that I didn't touch it again until this past December. It also didn't help that the max storage of 1GB for the free version really restricts the creative capabilities of HTML.

In December, I was on winter break of my second year at my second attempt of getting a bachelor's degree. During the semesters I'm essentially pulling 70-hour work weeks between my real job and school, so I felt the need to speedrun as many hobbies as I could with the one month of free time (at least, as free as 40 hours of work each week can feel in comparison). I was doing any and every creative activity I could think of/was in my budget, including:

Making a Zine (unfinished as of now)

Crochet (re-teaching myself the basics, then diving into filet crochet)

Spreadsheets (yes, that can be a fun creative hobby!)

Getting back into this website!!

In revisiting NeoCities as a creative outlet during this break, I decided that it would be worth the $5 a month to allow myself a higher bandwidth and storage. I had to re-teach myself a lot of basic HTML, given that my only experience with it was customizing my Tumblr theme back in the early 2010's. I decided to not use a theme template made by anyone, and instead designed the layout myself, using just the information available to me from places like W3Schools and StackExchange. I went with a two-column setup with navigation on the left and the meat and potatoes of the site on the larger right side, as shown below:

Pretty garish, right? I feel that it fits me, though. I'm a pretty garish person.

I definitely went overboard with the banner buttons. In addition to the HTML, I also did a lot of perusing on an archive of old GeoCities sites, as well as some currently-hosted NeoCities sites (just through the "Browse" tab on the homepage). I also got too lazy/paranoid about my storage so I didn't download the banner button images, but instead linked them from their hosted websites. That led to a slightly lengthy load time for the homepage, as it had to go and fetch every one of those websites every time.

From the basic layout of the site, I went ahead and made navigation links for the topics that I figured I would want to write about, which was basically just the hobbies I had listed above. I wrote a few small pages about the projects I had done over the break. A lot of them are very unpolished, and I've been meaning to go back and clean up the content but now that I'm in another semester it's been hard to find the time, or so I've been telling myself. It's not really that I have a severe lack of time, it's a severe lack of time management that I struggle with. But I try to give myself grace because I know I've had a lot of extremely distressing personal issues in the last year that I've been spending a lot of time unpacking and processing.

I had experienced a resurgence in my lifelong love of old technology about a month into this spring semester. It was very serendipitous that I happened to sign up for the same class as someone I had Calc 3 with back in my first semester at this university two years ago, Kat. They're very into old technology (which, for their age, refers to things before they were born/conscious enough to use - for me it's just the technology I grew up with). They had showed me a computer called the Panasonic Let's Note, a laptop that's not exactly super old, but has a frutiger aero aesthetic and is only available to consumers in Japan. I was drawn to it because not only does it have a cd/dvd drive built-in (such a rarity these days!), but also a circular trackpad which is just so novel to me.

        Isn't she adorable??

Even though I had a laptop already, I decided to make this new laptop my singular splurge from the student refund I had gotten. One of my major beefs with my newer laptop is the integration of the dreaded Cloud. I remember when, in late elementary school, The Cloud was still a very new concept - how innovative that you could access your files anywhere through the internet! I was a big fan, up until concerns over tech companies harvesting your files' data and demanding subscriptions for storage became a concern. This newer laptop, which I had bought in 2022 or so, kept telling me that I was out of storage and needed to upgrade to a higher allotment - that's when I discovered it was saving all of my files to OneDrive and not my own local device. I immediately told it to shut up and use my normal god-given physical hard drive, that I would put files in the Cloud if I felt like I wanted them there, but on an opt-in basis. Then when I enrolled in this university and logged in to my school email (hosted by Outlook), it took me a while to notice that then my computer just decided to put all of my files on my university OneDrive - which I also did NOT ask it to do!

I wanted a device completely out of the clutches of this damn Cloud. I still use my old laptop for school stuff since it's still got my university's Microsoft office license, but this laptop is a nice reprieve when I'm only doing hobby activities. Kat helped me install Windows 10 for Enterprise, Long-Term Servicing Channel, which means it also comes without any of the AI crap (copilot forcing its way into every aspect of my other computer was also a major annoyance, even as I tried running scripts off Github to remove all AI it would always re-insert itself in updates). I'm making a point of staying signed out of any Microsoft accounts (except within the confines of a web browser) so that this computer stays as a fully local-device user account.

So far, some of the stuff I've gotten up to on this laptop are:

Ripping cd's and dvd's

Setting up a Win95 virtual machine

Moving my ProTracker emulator from the other laptop to here

Changing the theme to be WinXP via WindHawk (my favorite OS theme from Windows!)

Reorganizing my personal library (books/academic article PDFs, music MP3s, movie MPEGs and etc.)

It's been a pretty fun time on this laptop the last two months I've owned it. Anyways, that wasn't the point of this blog post: back to this site overhaul.

I really started to get back into this (again) at the start of April, after not looking at the site for the first 3 months of the semester. I started by rethinking the layout of the site - instead of 2 columns, I decided to switch to 3. At first I didn't really have any idea of what to do with the third, but I just thought that two was too few for the width of a desktop screen. I looked up how to do a grid in CSS and implemented that - my first ever foray into CSS! I also changed the overall color scheme from pink and blue to pink and orange - what else could you expect from a lesbian!! I did like the pink/blue but I also know it was incredibly hard on the eyes.

Then I signed up for statusCafe, which I had seen on a few other NeoCities pages. At first I had it only display the most recent status update (which was all that the host site gives HTML templates for), but I just finished implementing a code to make it show all updates in a scrollable sidebar (code for all status updates courtesy of Bechno Kid linked on my Resources page). It was also a hassle to make it show the update time in a normal format instead of the usual UTC 24-hour format, I'll make a page about the code behind that later.

Now I gotta go back and change all my pre-existing pages to match this layout. Ahh what a hassle when I just wanna keep making new pages!! Maybe I'll only change the homepage and then keep the others as a memento of the original layout.

Anyways I think that's it for now!! I'll try to keep updates more regular, not that anyone is really reading this stuff but moreso for myself. Toodles!