not sure if you get this question a lot but where did you make this website / how and where did you learn to make them? they look so good!!!
Hiya! I'm always happy to answer questions about making simple websites :D
I have an out-of-the-way page on my site called "documentation" where I was documenting how I made my site.. it's a bit out of date at this point though.
I started with hosting on Neocities, much like many other people. It's free and the adult content rules are fairly lax. I learned by copy/pasting templates, and editing the template until the HTML/CSS made sense to me so I could make my own LOL.
Then I moved to Vercel, because I was outgrowing Neocities's speed and size limitations. And Vercel is free. But I'm trying to get off of Vercel because it keeps trying to shove ai shit in my face.
Now some of my sites (like my wiki and art archive) are hosted with my pal Kat on her computers! Isn't it cool that your friend can just leave their laptop open and your website is on it?! This is the ideal site hosting situation for me, I love trading skills and goods with real people, and not giving money to faceless corporations.
I know not everyone knows someone who runs home servers... I would still recommend hosting on Neocities for beginners! That is more than sufficient if you just want to display text and images. And then probably Nearly Free Speech if you need more control.
I'm glad you are enjoying the websites. I'm getting the itch to remake my main site now that I KINDA know how to use 11ty and astro :P
How I feel when someone's 1990s-style personal site about some topic that they're passionate about has a huge list of links to other 1990s-style personal sites and web rings to even more
Hi!! I wanted to say that I loved reading about your journey of creating a personal website. I'm still unsure between Vercel and Netlify. I have a small question to ask. See, one of the reasons I want to make a website is to archive drawings and journal/sketchbook. Would you have any tips for creating an area on my website just for the diary/journal, which has tags, files for each entry, etc.?
Bello!
Really happy to hear about your interest in websites! I want everyone to make their own site so I don't have to log into social media and get instant tummyaches ♥
Vercel vs Netlify: I think I settled on Vercel for absolutely no reason whatsoever. I just made a site on Netlify, then tested on Vercel, and now I have like 5 websites on Vercel so I just kept using it LOL. I'm sure a more tech-savvy person would know the difference - I think they have certain integrations with specific programs.
Creating a diary or journal with tags:
There's a couple of different ways you can do that, with different levels of work needed.
you got me yapping again:
This sadgrl tutorial might be outdated and may or may not work, but explains the process better than I can.
Easiest: make a journal on Dreamwidth, or another blogging site (wordpress??) that allows easy tags and RSS feed, and embed that RSS feed onto your site.
This requires almost no HTML set-up, and the easiest to organize tags, but you don't truly have the data on your own site since it's just embedded.
When I snuck into a web design class at college, this was one of the methods that the professor used for a blog within a portfolio site LOL.
Shit like wordpress is what a LOT of ~professional~ sites do for their blog section. They code it separately from the main site haha. It's the most popular thing, but not necessarily the best. And wait til you read on what the CEO of wordpress has been having meltdowns about... he owns tumblr too!
It's made with a tutorial for Neocities if that's what you use.
Medium: Set up zonelets.
It will require some HTML and JS editing, but will help automate making headers/footers for each page of a blog.
I've never used it myself, but I see other people speak highly of it.
HARD FOR ME CUZ I'M A GORILLA: I believe a lot of professional web devs will slap your face with their coding cock until you use a static site generator (SSG) to make your site.
You will need some coding knowledge to set up the tagging system since it doesn't come with it enabled by default. But it's made explicitly to be an alternative to big Static Site Generators which are...
It requires some more intimidating knowledge, because it's a lot of scripts that turn files that are not HTML/CSS/JS into plain HTML.
Also you have to use the command line, and that doesn't come with buttons that tell you what you can do. You have to copy/paste all that shit or memorize the code to 'dev build astro' and it all looks silly.
I've used Eleventy, and now am using Astro. Other people use Hugo or Jekyll or some other stuff with crazy names like Glup Shitto. I hate all these sites cuz none of the words mean anything to me. This is a common theme for me and tech. I don't know what NODES or CONTENT or ISLANDS are!!!
I had the most success attempting to learn how to use a SSG by downloading a template and altering it with github + VScodium. Here's the template page for Astro. You click on a theme you like, and it takes you to its github page. (If you don't want to use evil Microsoft stuff sorry. Skip this entire section.) Follow the instructions on the page for "forking" the glup shitto. When it tells you to run commands, I run those commands through the terminal window in VScodium. These tutorials never tell you what these commands do cuz they assume you already know. Usually those commands automatically install the files you need onto your computer, and create the final files.
You can see my wip here for a "tag system" that SHOULD show members of a web listing haha but I don't know what I'm doing and I have a reading disorder AND don't know cumputer good.
THEORETICALLY this will be the simplest and easiest way to maintain tags and files, because after you set it up you just have to write the "content" of the blog page. And you don't have to set up the header/footer ever again. I see the vision, and potential, but I am not there yet when it takes me 5 hours a day to figure out what any of the words in the documentation mean and I don't want to ask an actual tech person cuz they will be like 'obviously just press the Blip on the Repository and then Suck My Ass in the command line".
(side note I haven't updated fujofans in like a year cuz I'm struggling with this part to make updating easier).
Con: the final HTML/CSS code is really ugly if it's "minified", and a lot of themes use """"""professional"""""" CSS libraries like Bootstrap and Tailwind that I honestly think are ugly cuz that's what every fuckin' tech website uses to style their pages and make them look Professional and Minimalist with stupid code like style="500-w dark-gray-balls D-cup-bra" on every single element. Even Toyhouse uses Bootstrap. Eugh!
But maybe you're smarter than me and can wrangle these things better!
That was really long. Woops. I hope you can slug through this wall of text and find something helpful. Feel free to email me if you have any more specific questions. I may or may not be helpful.
If someone else sees this and has better suggestions for making BLOGS, please chime in. I'm begging you.
I finally updated my site! Yay!! This is why I poofed a bit. I updated a bunch of code and stuff (please read the updates, it's so long), and tried to keep making sure the site worked well enough and could be read well enough. One big thing was of course updating all the digimuyo galleries. Mostly the all ages one, but there's one in the R15 section.
Other big thing was making the galleries for both series separately. I still need to make the Tenchi one just because this update in general took out so much but the Digimon one is up. I also still need to already switch the gallery type out for another one lol.
Also joined some webrings. One I have to wait to see if I'm accepted but they're fun.
anyway, the links to those are on the site, go peruse, journey, have fun, I gotta go sleep!!!
Using my wiki as god did NOT intend it - to embed iframes of stuff I want to regularly edit on my phone.
Example:
My commissions page on my main site shows my commissions wiki page for status updates.
It loads a LOT faster than Airtable or Cryptpad or trello lemme tell ya that! I can edit it anywhere I have internet, without an app. Might change my price list to be on my wiki too, I hate how slow Airtable loads!
Example 2:
The frontpage of my site shows the now page of my wiki for what I'm working on, and what live events I may do.
In the past I've embedded my manually written RSS feed as an iframe and enjoyed that - except for the "manually writing an RSS feed" part, which I find difficult on desktop and impossible on my phone.
Then I switched to embedding the RSS feed from this blog with javascript. Which is fine, cuz writing updates on this blog is easier than manually doing an RSS feed, but it loads slowly.
I'm sure you're NOT supposed to do this with wikis, and you're NOT supposed to use iframes in 2025. But IDK whatever. No one has told me what is the proper way that is also easy. So I will continue to jury rig Hugelculture mounds with my online setup until they fall over in a hurricane.
At long last, I've updated my website! Micromanaged, just the way I like it XD It no longer uses Wordpress, and is instead less bloated, more mobile friendly--or as best as it can be with my skills--and best of all, easier for me to update LOL
I have tons of sections now, including more art, graphic design samples and comic pages. Please check it out if you'd like! \ o /
