Coding
November 21, 2024
November 21, 2024
this neocities was created on the 30th of september in 2020. i didn't know anything about html back then, and i still don't. well not really, i still know a bunch of basic stuff but the way i am right now is pretty much being a noob at this.
neocities is so fascinating to me, such a large userbase holding what could easily be the greatest independent websites of the world and (mostly) for free. where did all these people learn to code such masterpieces like that? how do you make a website look THAT good? i could never see myself doing things like these. so what i did was grab the most basic code from them and tried to understand it, maybe search one or two things in w3schools or stack overflow for a specific idea i had. but i kept on grabbing from everybody else.
it's something i admittedly still do for maintaining the rest of this website. all the layout you see here was designed by sadgrl.online, and touched up by me specially in the color department. finding her website and her layout maker helped me get the idea to finally do something special with my neocities, and i would like to thank her a lot even if the layout is mostly unchanged but also because she might not be reading this anyway.
grabbing someone else's code may not be the most honest practice, and it could perfectly be something that is frowned upon in this community. but i try to do the effort to understand what's going on, not like i would build something like it, but i at least comprehend how it works. although something that might be a little controversial has helped me a lot too.
a big majority of people in neocities are anti-AI, which is something i can perfectly understand as to the reasons why. AI is scary, is sketchy, and is pretty much taking over. but for me, i could get an use out of it for the two or three days i spent working on this new layout. do you see those 88x31 buttons scrolling by? microsoft's copilot helped me make a javascript that can store all of the images, shuffle them randomly and display them in that marquee. this is how i implemented the new scrolling button system, it helps me keep them a little organized too since i originally just had them lying around in the source code. and if i wanted to add a new image, i had to manually add it to every page, and copilot just saved me all of that time.
not only that, but it also helped me make a batch script that exports a .txt file out of a folder of images which formats them in the same way they are in the javascript, so that everytime i download a new bunch of images i can just very quickly paste them into the script. do you see how the title and text are in separate blocks? copilot helped me with that too, i couldn't for the life of me figure out how to make them work the way i wanted to and copilot just did it. the duck facts in the contact page? that was copilot too, i originally had three preset facts but i thought it'd be more fun to have other facts shuffling at random.
now you may take this as some kind of ai shill, like microsoft is paying me to advertise their ai. personally i could never see myself using that for any purpose other than coding this wretched website. but i think it could help show some people that ai could actually help you with things, i personally like copilot specifically because it looks through the internet and isn't fed off of some weird database from 4 years ago. please don't take this the wrong way, but if i did all of this completely myself just relying on obscure stack overflow threads that didn't even have what i had in mind, i would've never finished this.
it explains why this redesign took me a surprisingly shorter time than i expected, other than i just happen to have a LOT of free time lately. im semi glad i could pick up mantaining this website again. if you had an idea for your neocities but never found a way to execute it, i believe you could try giving copilot a shot. for an ai that is forced down your throat it's surprisingly okay. and you are still able to learn, because it explains what some of the attributes or parameters are doing. just a disclaimer though: DON'T RELY TOO MUCH ON IT! it's an ai, it is still pretty much bound to fail sometimes. but it can help you giving a base idea in what to do.
where was i?
i already said this in the index page, but i hope you really like the new layout! i wanted to do something special after leaving this neocities in the dust for several months. im currently considering implementing a music / portfolio page but im not really sure if i should, since i don't have a supporter subscription to host all of the audio files and i don't think i want to be too reliant on external file hosting services. also because it feels like im trying to sell something, which im not. at least anymore.
sorry if this entry got a little too off track, but they're things i feel that you should know. thanks for reading!