~ the making of this blog ~
first post, huh? generally, the abstract idea of a blog haunted me for a while. as a kid, i've started A LOT of diaries, but scant any survived past a month, the singular ekseption being my sleep diary... ^^'
the concrete idea of a blog appeared as far back as my first year of highschool, i think! thenabouts, as i started learning python and later c++, my school introduced compulsory courses in html. my side things propelled me a bit ahead of the class, which resulted in me being in good ties with the highschool cs teach. this then culminated into me being selected to handle the webshop for the next year's end-of-the-year business collab project!
the initial idea
fast forward to about a year back from right now, i happened upon a lot of time on my hands with my summer break. among many other projects, sometime inbetween learning ASL, going to ham radio meetups one of my online friends briefly mentioned neocities in passing, which i haven't paid much heed to (not yet, anyway :p ).
somewhere inbetween that and discovering a certain blog (more on that later), i decided to try my hand at css, as separately from other stuff as possible, just because. this resulted in a few mock sites — mostly just playing around, from which i've quickly moved on to whatever other interests have snatched me by my ankle back then...
sometime later, browsing twitter, i've stumbled upon @awawawhoami's blog. i thought it a fun little potential project to try and make a page for myself. after all, i'm on the interwebz quite a lot, so why not, yeah!
long story short,
my gusto and spare attention gave out past the first obstacle. now... it's hard to say on what exactly i stumbled back then that demotivated me so, but i've quit before i finished the first style prototype, just after i was through with the homepage and finished the header. i've scoured A LOT of random blogs for references but turned out not to have helped, if not made the whole learning thing worze! ;v;
now, a year+ past my last try to now, once again i've found myself behind a keyboard, with a lot of free time. since my last try, though, lots of things have changed and i came back with more resolve, and definitely more willpower. i really wanted to do something creative that would also give me an excuse to (this time, actually) learn something new.
my choice of the skeleton for this website came from the aforementioned @awawawhoami's blog — my selection of eleventy, sass, njk for templating i owe entirely to it. also, i suppoze, the usual credit is due here — multiple issues on github, endless stackoverflow questions all helped out. (although, admittedly, i've found myself choosing to go the more appropriate route of going through The Docs and trying to solve a given problem by myself before even thinking to turn to the googlez. most of the headaches came from js stuff as i had literally zilch prior experience with it. perks of making something really simple, i guess :p )
there's still a huge todo list that mounts with each day, of what i want to do with the site. a lot of stuff lies half-broken/semi-functioning, but as i switch to working on other stuff and come back, i fix up the mess behind me — y'know, how it usually goes!
i see this project living a long, maybe a less-than-happy and definitely not the healthiest life, as i always have stuff to write about (besides being a ceritified graphomaniac) and will be seeing my todos (hopefully) to its end (for now the big points are: a side-microblog part, a shoutbox and eventually moving away from neocities, as thankful as i am for their service).
