Added a date to the title because I think this type of post is going to have to be a regularly recurring thing on the blog. I've been having so much fun exploring the world of the indie web, coding, web design, etc. and I want to document my journey as I go.
First of all, my adventures with my own site. Over the past couple months, there have been a lot of big changes over here. I built a brand new fanfic archive in January (which I do like better than the old one, but I've already got some ideas on how to make it better, so expect it to change again soon lol). Also, several of the shrine pages finally went live. This blog page is one of many new sections added to the site in February. And there's a guestbook here now, as well as comment sections for the fanfic pages. Shoutout to Ayano for coding the comments widget I used on those pages.
New skills I learned while working on these updates? Well, to start, I finally figured out how flexbox works. I used to have to google every specific thing I wanted it to do so I'd now how to code it, because the whole system was like a foreign language to me. While working on the fanfics page, it finally clicked and I have it down now. Same with building navigation tabs. Although, I do wish I could figure out a way to do navigation tabs without having to rely on Javascript. Oh, and I've been slowly learning how to make the site more accessible as well as mobile friendly. That's still a work in progress, but I'm figuring it out one step at a time!
What about the world outside my own web space? I have had so much fun in that area as well!
Discovered a TON of cool neocities sites. I saw a post on the MelonLand Forum complaining that there isn't any creativity on neocities anymore, and I have no idea what that person was talking about because I have found so many amazingly creative sites over the last few months alone. I'll be adding a lot of them to my Web Directory page soon, and I'm considering also creating some kind of "neighborhood map" sort of page to show off some of my web neighbors.
Speaking of MelonLand, I highly recommend it to anyone just getting started in coding or trying to build a personal site for the first time. It's a wonderful little forum where a bunch of indie web enthusiasts have gathered to discuss, share, and show off their own website building adventures.
I'm also continuing my exploration of alternative social media sites. These last few months, I've focused specifically on trying out Pillowfort and CoHost -- both of them blogging platforms that were created to be alternatives to Tumblr. Having used both for about four months now, I can safely say that neither are going to become new "hangouts" for me. I want to do a full write up of my experiences on both sites in another blog post. For now, I can sum it up as they're both promising but not yet at a level where they can compete with Tumblr. (Also, they both very different local cultures from what I'm used to other sites, so I don't think I'd be comfortable staying on either site longterm.) However, I am happy to see that there are so many other social media sites out there. I've always hated the idea of a monopoly in any aspect of life, but especially on the internet. It's good to see so many thriving communities outside of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Lastly, resources! I found this online 'Markdown-to-HTML' converter and this 'PlainText-to-HTML' converter. They've come in very handy for getting my fanfics formatted and ready to post on here. This text gradient generator is really useful for coding color gradients in your text; it also has options so you can output your code as either HTML or BBCode. And found this simple tutorial for creating a "back to top" button for your webpage. Yes, that last one is probably obvious to a lot of people, but I'm a newbie and genuinely had no clue how to go about doing this before finding that comment. Anyway, I'll be adding all these to my resources page, along with a few other handy tools I discovered recently.
That is all for now. I shall continue my exploration of the indie web and my efforts to learn how to code. And I'll continue dropping progress updates in case these posts help out anyone else who is new to this world like me.
Background Image by Valentin Salja