hello, new here :)

[shevek]

Hey! I've read here for a while as a guest and decided to make an account yesterday. I was a little afraid I might not be able to sign up or read as a guest in the future and miss out on the wholesomeness and good advice here.
I also really love the design of this place.

I have two neocities websites, but they're both currently under construction because I am kinda redoing the concept of them; I had one of them first, then created another to be akin to a carrd. But now I want the carrd one to be a more complete hub of my projects and interests, and maybe reserve the other for other things. So linking them will have to wait :) it's almost done though! I promise the wait will be worth it. It's probably my biggest website design project I've made. 

I appreciate the time and thought you all put into the space here.

shevek

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Edit 04/07/2023:

I think it is time to rework this for people who read this way past when I signed up, since a lot changed since then.
My website rework is long done and can be found linked in my profile :) I built up a second site to be more of a portfolio and more tech focused, and changed my other site to redirect.

I am currently focusing on university (part time law student), coding projects for the Steam Deck (music visualizer for the Desktop, and custom CSS for the Gaming Mode), and I am helping to mod the forum. I am always switching stuff up on my sites and thinking of new ways to improve them! My next bigger project will be a fan site for one of my favorite games.
I am learning Python, Rust, JavaScript on the side as good as I can right now, and I am planning to make some games with Lua in the future.

You can always talk to me about the Steam Deck, TTRPGs, BlueBrixx/Lego sets, anti-capitalism, data protection, the right to repair, veganism and the evils of intellectual property law with me (and other things, of course; but to give a selection!). My favorite games are Stardew Valley, Coffee Talk, Mass Effect and Dragon Age; right now, I am enjoying playing House Flipper, Deep Rock Galactic, and Hypnospace Outlaw.

Oh, and my walls of text usually sound much more serious and intimidating than intended. Someone in a class of mine once said to me that I come across as if I read Wikipedia all day; this might give you an idea of what to expect.

[TheFrugalGamer]

Hello and welcome to the forum! I'm always happy to see more folks joining in and adding to the conversation. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with regarding your sites!

[Melooon]

Hello, welcome to the forum 

Sometimes it's better to just get stuff out there and work on it in the public eye, that's often the best way I find to get myself working! Regardless I look forward to seeing what you doo!

What sort of projects do you work on?

Hope you enjoy your time here!

☀︎☁︎☻→ You've Received Melon's Welcome Pack! ←☻✌︎☀︎

• If you haven't already check out the forum welcome post, and forum usage guide!
• New to website making? Here is a complete(ish) guide!
• Visit your look/layout to pick a theme and set a default colour/font for your messages!
• Feeling shy and unsure what to do? Maybe post a song you like here!
• Finally don't forget to share the forum and invite friends! We have some way cool graphics over here!

[shevek]

You're right :) I hope I can start putting it online soon and just correct some remaining bits and pieces here and there. But I am currently still in the art stage

I am creating a background for the home page with a big text area, a shelf to the right holding various things, and to the left a window, a window pane and a desk. The desk holds a laptop, a sewing machine, a glass of brushes and there's also the embroidery hoop holder. The entire thing is created in pixel art, in Aseprite.
About 15 things are going to be clickable and lead to their own pages; the little cat head in the shelf is going to lead to my neocities page, for example.
I thought about uploading each item separately and positioning it with CSS onto the background with empty shelf and desk, but it's a bit much and having the exact placement is important, so I think I will experiment with imagemaps. I hope it works out. I have found a great website that lets you upload the image and mark the areas you want to be clickable, and then it generates code. The items could be included in the background image then.

Another interesting part of it will be potential animation. I initially wanted whatever was "behind" the window to be animated; maybe passing clouds, rain, whatever. But then I realized GIF would suck as background image due to the quality and the limited color support. If I really do imagemap and upload the background image as is with the items, then I also can't move a gif there separately where the window is, because it would overlap with an item.
So I am currently thinking about if I really wanna go the route of creating an animation in Aseprite, exporting all frames as .png, and using an APNG assembler to turn it into an .apng. That would keep the quality and colors, and is supported in modern browsers.

Currently the window is the only thing left to finish, then I can finally start the coding. Most pages behind the items already exist and I just need to edit some links, thankfully.

This entire art project so far has taken me about 50 hours now, I am really looking forward to be entering the coding phase soon.   

[shevek]

Sorry it took so long! I think I am about done with the change of the site now :) all done in Aseprite, Photoshop and Brackets together with image-map.net and APNGAssembler.
edit: Warning for epileptics, there are slight glitter-sprinkles on the page that twinkle, just in case that is relevant to you.

Daintyeco now holds all of my stuff! You might have seen my old main edit: old main doesn't exist anymore :), and I'll keep that around for some browser coding projects and the Steam Deck Themes I wanna create.

Known issues: Safari on tablet turns the site into a blingee, Safari on phone seems to work. Chrome and Firefox should be fine. Smaller screen users have to zoom out, this is something I am actively working on fixing.

Let me know if anything is weird or cool.
@lostletters You wrote me something so nice on my wall yesterday, thank you again for that <3

Future plans for the site are:

Spoiler

- Links page for cool pages and buttons of other sites :)
- Change music player (can anyone recommend one that plays youtube urls and also isn't winamp? <3)
- Downsize the sewing/embroidery images and correct image proportions (you might notice they stretch a bit)
- RSS feed option on some pages like the Steamdeck one
- Rework laptop pages to fit into the selection aesthetic
- The switch getting its ACNH page and becoming clickable
- Finish up the Filou page
- Custom cursor
- Dark theme

[close]

[gridbug]

Hello!

I clicked over to see what's cooking on your website, and I am blown away, this is super cool stuff! I imagine the praise of a stranger, a stranger who is terrible at web design (I just plopped a template in their and it's still barely functional) but I just had to share, it's all just great, exciting stuff.

The idea of the currently reading books section on the personal page is a really cool idea as well, I was posting my book blogging on tumblr, but I want to cross post them to Neocities in the future, and the currently reading section is a great idea. as well. I don't know what best practices is, but if you don't mind I will credit you if I end up using the idea formatting-wise, maybe adding another bar for the books, or a bookshelf. It's all just super neat 

[shevek]

@gridbug that's super sweet of you to say, thank you! I myself got inspired by meixins, we follow eachother on neocities. :)

And you'll definitely learn! I also only seriously started this year. I used to change themes on MySpace and Tumblr, then do nothing for probably a decade. Made a neocities a year ago, created a landing page from scratch that was broken and then gave up. I did the most of the coding and learning this year in January. Starting with templates and editing it continuously until it barely resembles the original is how many people start or where their design comes from. You'll get the hang of it!
Stackexchange and ChatGPT were the best for when I had questions, though I have to say, the latter's quality in regards to the correctness of coding info/answers to questions in regards to HTML and CSS has been going down rapidly since February. But I wanted to mention it anyway

I've found it is super valuable to rightclick > Inspect on other people's sites or rightclick to show the code as well to see and understand how specific things are done in the first place. You don't need to copy it outright and it isn't useful if you do, but for me, it has changed the way I think about code or how to do something in the first place when I set out to do it. 

[gridbug]

Thank you for the encouragement @shevek ! I know it's just a matter of having a good chunk of time to work through it all and make something nice, but it can still feel daunting, so knowing you were able to do a lot of this in January is really inspiring!

Meixins's website is super cute! I love it a lot, all of the fun buttons and graphics and animations aah it's so fun 

My biggest challenge with coding the websites is remembering all of the tags and things you can do with the thing, I think once I actually am sitting down and writing a page I will start to remember what I can do and how to do it, I guess now it's more frustrating to try and translate what I have in my head to a computer screen. The screen inspector is a good idea, I will just need to read more, look around more, study the masters, and before I know it I'm going to have a cool website to show off : D

I've been blown away by people saying that ai can now write whole web pages based on a sketch, that's super cool, but also kind of scary for people making web pages for a living, I guess there was already stuff like squarespace and wix, and you still need at least one person with technical expertise to set up webpages...for now, and then the computers will overtake us : o

Just again thanks for the advice, I need all the positive energy to keep going on this internet journey（・ｗ・)