notes from another side

i think i'm a little late to the game, lol.

1. Please introduce yourself.: "i'm nobody / who are you? / are you nobody too? / then there's a pair of us / don't tell / they'd advertise, you know / how dreary, to be somebody / how public, like a frog / to tell one's name, the life long june / to an admiring bog" --- emily dickinson
2. How long have you been making websites?: sometime in elementary school, i became obsessed with khan academy, and i wanted to achieve mastery in as many units as i could in hopes of earning a black hole badge. i think i started with the javascript modules, but then got bored and annoyed and moved over to trying the html/css/website modules. i jumped onto freecodecamp when it came out, and spent a lot of time on codeacademy. the khan academy stuff was long enough ago that i had a "summer of code" badge on my profile, which earned a lot of suspicion when i tried to join a khan academy discord server a few years ago.
3. And what got you into the hobby?: like i said, i wanted to earn a black hole badge :D curiously enough, all the time i spent on coding courses aimed at aspiring professionals meant i never thought i could make websites for the hell of it. then a tumblr post introduced me to neocities, i started writing a diary, and the rest was history.
4. What kind of website are you most interested in?: mine. though any other website filled to the brim with writing is also interesting. when i started using neocities, i ran into a lot of pretty-looking websites whose only writing was about web revival, some kind of manifesto, and some links to the yesterweb stuff. these were annoying and definitely discouraged me from looking at neocities sites for a bit---why spend so much time on making stuff look pretty if there's no WORDS. I WANT YOUR WORDS. thankfully, more writing-focused websites have been created, or located since then.
5. What's your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly or do you come up with the design as you go along?: umm. i have a goal, and i try to achieve it, and then i forget about it, and then i get back to it whenever i remember it. to escape this process, i keep my websites simple and never go for graphic-heavy complicated-layout designs.
6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.: half of my inspirations have been lost to time and/or explosive relationships. the remainder include: hat, bikobatanari (rip), vivarism, suboptimalism, house of leaves, and frogesay.
7. What's your favourite part about making websites?: exorcising thoughts from my head.
8. And the thing you struggle with the most?: organizing the thoughts that i've exorcised.
9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones?: look around and see for yourself. most pages are the same, more or less, except for a few that aren't.
10. How confident are you with CSS?: i'm fine with basic formatting properties. anything more complex (ex. float, grids, anything about layout really) leads to me throwing spaghetti at the wall and begging professor google (usually via decade-old stack-overflow posts) for answers.
11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>?: i do, but i choose not to.
12. What is your favourite HTML element?: <dl> :^
13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do?: have an experience or thought that causes me to want to open up the text editor and get to work.
14. Do you know JavaScript?: nope.
15. How about PHP?: hell no.
16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to?: it's me / hi / i'm the topic / it's me
17. Are you more focused on content or design?: (・_・)
18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to?: not anymore. i genuinely hate paying for things, especially on a regular basis.
19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites?: nostalgia-focused websites make me think about the yesterweb and all of the drama that happened surrounding that. i think nostalgia-focused / retro websites tend to get obsessed with looking nostalgic without there being any content. there are a lot of teenagers who are obsessed with a web that never really existed. overall, i don't think twice about them, but when i find those content-free retro pages i do feel annoyed.
20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check?: my html is not valid. i do not think about web standards and good practice. this is my website, and i am my target audience, so i am primarily concerned with what works for me.
21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners?: avoid. dislike. negative. annoying. a few are cute and can be nice details, or might give me something to look into, but an entire wall of them is disgusting and annoying and useless.
22. What do you think of button walls in particular?: i would rather see a list of links with descriptions of those links. you can even use <dl> to make that :D
23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different?: every time i start over, i vow to do something different, and then i do the exact same thing again. my website has always been a diary with accouterments, and no number of vows shall change this.
24. Are you envious of other people's websites?: occasionally...i wish i had the patience and interest to make the kind of high-effort pages vivarism does. her pages are so pretty and cool and whimsical and UGH.
25. What text editor do you use?: sublime
26. Why do you use that one?: i didn't update komodo for a few years, and then when i updated it i hated how it looked. one of the books i was reading (by jon duckett?) mentioned sublime, so i went with that.
27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host?: i don't know if i can really count neocities as 'my' web server, but all of my images are hosted here.
28. This might not be relevant to you, but what's your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate?: kill the debate. i am under the impression that nekoweb users have some deep-seated hatred of kyle drake, who i have zero opinion of. neocities works. i'm sure nekoweb also works. i do not care.
29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up?: currently 26.2mb. if i wonder how much it'll go up if/when i get around to uploading an archive of my old websites.
30. Do you keep local backups of your files?: yeah. sometimes i even move them to a usb.
31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites?: as long as it doesn't hurt my eyes, i don't care.
32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious?: i'm not sure.
33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why?: many, many, many times. i've deleted this account more times than i can count. mostly, it's because i'm running away from people and/or problems.

this is from when i closed labyrinth.monster

nobody was wondering.

I've deleted labyrinth.monster. I don't plan on hosting a new site in the future. Despite emailing dozens of people, I've found nobody to talk to. You lot might respond to one email, at most two. Maybe you have the right idea—the odds of me fucking up any conversation are too high. The one human who did bother to respond more than twice could probably testify to that. Nobody reaches out to me either. This isn't surprising; leaving Neocities left me with a small—but not nonexistent—audience. Yet in the six months this site was hosted on Neocities, nobody new reached out. One person reached out to my Neocities site from the previous year; I think I kept that site up for four months. Twelve months of websites. How disappointing.

I see no point in continuing to polish and publicize my thoughts. My loneliness grows worse by the day; talking at people only exacerbates this pain. Why continue trying to be understood by an absent audience? Why continue repeating the same actions and expecting a different result? Why put in effort when nobody else will? I can't keep doing this.

I can still be reached at defenestrating-squirrels@protonmail.com. Why? Some desolate speck of hope persists. Well, back to studying, reading, writing, trying to deal with my problems, and squashing my social desires. Signing off,

Nobody
34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby?: lol no.
35. Do people in your real life know about your website?: i think there's a person or two who is vaguely aware that i have a personal website.
36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"?: i usually update it a few times a month.
37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not?: for the most part, there's no need for me to change my website design, so i don't. sometimes i'll update it to reflect additions to content or to have a better organization system.
38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused?: (・_・)
39. Do you do web design professionally?: no.
40. If not, would you like to? And if you're comfortable answering, what do you do for work?: part of me would like to, and part of me knows i'd be bored/annoyed by that job after three months. ai would probably take it anyways. currently, i'm a line cook.
41. Do you communicate with people by email very much?: from time to time, yes. i do enjoy getting to have conversations with others over email; however, i am terrible at initiating conversations and terrified of bothering people. maybe the inherent intimacy of human interaction frightens me.
42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website?: see i don't subscribe to the whole "reject social media take back the web" approach. instagram and a personal website are fundamentally different platforms. i don't use social media, but that's because there's no reason for me to use it.
43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them?: ummmmm i've used tox from time to time? i always feel awkward joining discord servers, so i eventually deleted that account.
44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists?: i listen to SMOOTHED BROWN NOISE. dunno who the artist is. i think i downloaded the file from archive.org a few years ago and have been looping it ever since. i mostly use it to tune out the noise around me. sometimes i listen to osts from anime i've never seen. on average, i'm not a fan of listening to music while doing things. it's distracting. if i like a song, i want to actively listen to it and engage with it, and not treat it as pretty background noise to vibe to.
45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one?: hmmm...currently, there's only one website.
46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many?: (・_・)
47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose?: i think my attempts to present my real self have led to me unintentionally constructing a persona. i feel like a different person when i'm not on my computer. this could be because of the highly personal nature of my website and my writing, though.
48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website?: it's complicated.
49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work?: no thoughts, head empty.
50. What are practices that you think people should avoid?: fuck autoplay.
51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more?: can i call "filling a website up with words" an under-utilised practice? (≧▽≦)
52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?: yes, i am guilty of generic structure. are you going to burn me at the stake for it?
53. Do you consider different browsers?: no.
54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it.: ugh. i hate all the browser debates. "use firefox, not chrome, because google is stealing all your data!" "don't use firefox, they're stealing your data too!" "internet explorer truther" i. don't. care. everybody is harvesting my data, and most browsers are roughly the same. i used to really like vivaldi for reasons i no longer remember though.
55. And what OS are you on?: zorrinOS
56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it?: not exactly. i was using bunsenlabs for a bit, but every few days it would randomly crash for no apparent reason, thus interrupting some call with someone that at the time seemed really important. i think i switched to nixOS after that. i cannot remember what the problem with that was that made me look for a simpler OS---i think i got tired of the hassle around installing software? or was it that i got tired of editing the user config file and realised i wanted a more hands-off OS? i was going to switch to ubuntu, but immediately ran into problems with it not recognizing the trackpad, or there was some other weird error that i was struggling to fix, and then i tried zorrinOS and it worked right out of the box.
57. Are your websites mobile-friendly?: inadvertently. you'll have to zoom in to read the text on mobile though.
58. What are your thoughts on autoplay?: kill it with fire. i hate being jumpscared and finding out that the audio on my computer was higher than it should be. sometimes i don't even recognize that the noises are coming from my computer, which creates unnecessary anger.
59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any?: the idea of having an index of vaguely-related sites is interesting. this is hypothetically a way to discover websites. i think webrings would be more functional if they were more selective and only allowed websites with a similar point---ex. a webring for knitting websites, or other shared hobbies/interests. as it stands webrings seem to include websites whose creators share some vague qualifier (ex. fans of thing), which never brings me to new websites i'm interested in. i'm not in any and i'm not interested in joining any.
60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page?: hmm...no, i don't think i have any web shrines. i've never been very interested in making or viewing shrines.
61. Are your websites "cliche", in your opinion?: i don't understand what would make a website cliche.
62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else?: these questions are starting to seem redundant. i could've sworn i already said a few things about preferring websites that are filled with words. give me your novels, your essays, your poetry, your thoughts. why are so many content-forward websites filled with writing on js libraries, programming, and other technical stuff? one could say that having a website appeals to that demographic, which is true, but could some other demographics please become interested in websites and blogs?
63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets?: no.
64. What are your favourite resource sites?: n/a.
65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try?: writing. alternatively, reading. alternatively, daydreaming. alternatively, thinking. alternatively, breathing.
66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster?: can y'all please write on your websites and use them? i understand spending 8hr on a weekend project and forgetting about it on monday, but you could try to stick to the hobby. make the website an extension of your hobbies / interests. this is not an alternative to carrd. it is so much better. a better way to say this might be: a website is another tool for communication, or another bit of art (in a weird sense). it takes the shape of whatever you put in it. so...stop obsessing over the shape and put something in it!
67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some?: the majority of the styling is in css. the only time i hard-code something is some one-off property that i'm only using in that place.
68. What do you think of frameset layouts?: i'm beginning to wonder why i've spent the past hour writing up my answers to these questions. i don't think i'm a committed enough webmaster to provide interesting enough answers to any of this.
69. How about table-based layouts?: maybe my problem with these questions is that "being a webmaster" isn't really a hobby for me. i'm a writer and reader, first and foremost, and i use a website to express these aspects of myself to the rest of the world. i think having an actual social life and not being a lonely bastard would replace the need for this website. then i'd just be a writer. instead of having a website, i'd have even more notebooks that are filled to the brim, and there would be no sorting between "thoughts i must put in the notebook or forbidden text files" and "everything else, which i am allowed to put on my website." would i be more interested in traditional publishing then? i think i'd still be on twitter / instagram, and i'd be using these to find more lit mags to submit to. come to think of it, i did stop submitting to lit mags shortly after i started using neocities. correlation does not equal causation. many other things happened around the same time.
70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Do you use any of these?: do i subscribe to the ideas...? those aren't only ideas, they are tried-and-true formatting methods that have been around for longer than either of us have been.
71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS?: most of my writing occurs in an html file. the css is said and done. who are these questions for? do the other webmasters spend too much time wrangling their css into place to think much about what they're putting into the html file?
72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It's useful for your thoughts.: i am increasingly convinced that these questions are aimed at the artsy-fartsy side of neocities. you're getting on my nerves. i'm getting on my nerves. i thought this would be a fun addition to my "august is for writing and interacting with the indieweb community," and now i keep wondering if i had any point to this challenge to begin with. i expected myself to seek out the myriad of discord servers and be more social. instead, i'm thinking about pixel art, some blog carnivals, and---well, i'm not socializing, that's for sure. this feels more inorganic than my reading challenge did.
73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises?: why would you make layouts that you didn't have a need for?
74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle?: beginner / middle / advanced at what, being a webmaster? this isn't exactly a skillset. "webmaster" is such a vague title and i strongly dislike it. i think we're trying to make ourselves sound pretentious. i know exactly what i need to know---how could someone be advanced at html, it's literally just a markup language that you can add other stuff to---and a few things more.
75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit?: occasionally, if there's something someone did that i want to copy, or if i want to see how something works. css is a strange tool. sometimes people leave interesting comments in their code. i also enjoy when people use strange names for their classes & ids.
76. How did YOU learn how to make websites?: by making them on khan academy. do people frequently ask you if you have memory problems? we already talked about this.
77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to?: my website is really fucking straightforward, so no.
78. Thoughts on floating elements?: it's a property. there are correct and incorrect ways to use it, and i don't care much for whether or not i'm using it 'correctly' when i need it. useful for formatting stuff, like image galleries.
79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else?: when i'm sizing text or other small elements (like borders), i use px. if i'm sizing elements or dealing with the overall format of the page, i use %.
80. Do you have a favourite font?: essays1743 has every character i need, no weird sizing issues, and is the perfect hybrid between a typewriter font and a serif font.
81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work?: yes, i've often daydreamed of some sort of public email exchange. the website would be formatted like an email inbox. we could "respond" to each other's emails, or we could send new emails. there would be pseudo-intellectual elements to our writing, as well as a strong fantasy aspect. this would give way to some sort of folie à deux. our emails would become indecipherable to the general public. we'd be so caught up in our shared delusion that we'd nearly forget that the emails were public, and our writing would begin to delve into stranger territories that probably should not be made public. this would be weird and sinister and probably end in criminal activity. eventually, we would plan to meet in real life, and one or two other fans of the website would appear at the meetup location for people-watching purposes. we would end up continuing the conversation at an offsite location, engage in some unspeakable activities, snap back to reality, and never speak to each other again.
82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often?: i have phases of hope and disappointment. for the most part, i return to the same couple dozen websites.
83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours?: i've bookmarked the ones whose names i kept forgetting. for the most part, i remember what websites i read and cycle through checking all of them once or twice a week. the websites i follow are not an accurate reflection of what i read, which is usually due to some personal connection to the websites i read but don't follow.
84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website?: my volume of writing. my website is lived in, thankyouverymuch!
85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect?: ...no.
86. How often and for how long are you online?: i spend most of my time on my computer, but i think the majority of that time is spent in the text editor or the file viewers. i'm not sure what it means to be online---if i'm clicking around to find the next book i'm reading, am i online? if i'm dealing with google sheets and going through financial accounts, am i online? checking emails must surely be online, as does haphazardly clicking through personal websites and youtube...i don't have a good answer to the question. i use my web browser when i need to use it for whatever i need to use it for. how long varies depending on usage.
87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience?: everyone who likes reading a stranger's diaries. voyeurs, come on in!
88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML?: no. i always figured that was for the professionals, not the hobbyists.
89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript?: not anymore, though i've certainly studied it when i was younger and had to take a class in college. one of my older websites had a simple js navbar, which i've since decided is pointless for me. i wouldn't count the ai javascript stuff as mine. overall, no, i have not written interesting code for my websites, nor have i had any need to.
90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one?: i don't understand ssgs, hugo, zonelets, jekyll, and i'm not about to get my hands dirty with them.
91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not?: nope, not interested.
92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones?: i plead the fifth.
93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document?: the majority of my pages are written in the text editor. sometimes i write things in my notes app and copy-paste them, but that's only when the computer isn't an option. adding <dd> or <p> tags to everything gets really annoying.
94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you're cool?: i'm under the impression that cool people have a strong personality and strong sense of identity. these are the people that i think of as irl video game characters. i am not cool.
95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame?: i think that the amount of personal stuff i've released to the internet should embarrass me, but it hasn't. i have repeatedly deleted everything for several reasons, but shame has never been one of them.
96. Would you close down your website if you couldn't update it, or would you leave an archive?: if i couldn't update the website, then i'd think i didn't have access to it, and thus couldn't close it down either. it lives until i have some emotional explosion, and then it dies.
97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive?: i feel as if i've revealed a lot of things without revealing much of anything. is what i put online an accurate portrayal of myself? i can't decide. sometimes i feel like what i put online is more real than what i put out into reality. i'm certainly more expressive in the written word than the spoken one.
98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website?: all i have is me, myself, and i.
99. And do you optimise the images on your website?: i shrink the file size down, and occasionally dither them.
100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? ....other than exhausted.: i am ready to answer these questions from someone else's perspective. if i had an evil alter ego, i'd let her do it. maybe i could cosplay as an overenthusiastic teenager, and gradually drop details that reveal she's some sort of supernatural creature who eats people?

one hundred questions for webmasters