Hi I'm new! And also old!

[Sara Joy]

I mean, not super old, only 40 😆

I was busy posting ASCII-art on USENET and making simple websites for myself in my teens and early 20s (from 1999-2006ish), before taking a big long hiatus from building any websites.

I've still been Extremely Online in all that time...

I gave up on making my own sites when blogging became a thing, and it was so much easier to pick up an existing free blogging platform and tweak it.

Also for many reasons, the whole "view source" method of learning how to build websites stopped being so useful. It took me a long time to understand that weird and complicated dev tools panel that came up when I accidentally hit F12 instead of F11 for full screen.

Anyway, after producing two offspring, I needed to change to my (lack of) career and taught myself how people develop websites in the 2020s - and boy is that different from 20 years ago!

So while I now work in deeply spaghettified React code in my day job, I hark back to the old days for my personal site, albeit with all the fun new stuff from CSS and with a bit of help from the Astro framework.

This way I don't have to do every single bit of markdown file management by hand from scratch, and can componentise layouts and headers etc. The HTML, CSS and JS is all mine, though :)

Have a look if you like!
https://sarajoy.dev

And a very work-in-progress "basic" version at https://sarajoy.dev/basic

[grubbyfox]

Hello fellow newbie!  I used to make websites in Frontpage, lol. Felt like a wizard when I was making websites with like, frames. I feel so old talking about ancient programs.

I see in your website that you're maybe also a fan of Teletext? I can barely grasp how Teletext works, but I just get giddy over the artwork in Teletext! Here's to us joining Melonland! 

[Icey!]

Hello! Young person here! Wow, you really out did yourself with your site! The background graphic is pretty, I also like how if you hover over the "leafs" it outlines what the graphic is made up of!

I also learnt something from looking at one of your blog posts...

https://sarajoy.dev/blog/color-scheme/

Never knew this CSS thingy existed, might use that later.

Anyways... Carry on!

[Sara Joy]

Felt like a wizard when I was making websites with like, frames.

I see in your website that you're maybe also a fan of Teletext? I can barely grasp how Teletext works, but I just get giddy over the artwork in Teletext! Here's to us joining Melonland! 

It was wizardry! Yeah my first ever sites had a frameset - in fact I can find it in the Internet Archive's wayback machine - but only the frameset, no content. It's probably for the best..

Yes I used to browse Teletext and even send messages in to the letter pages like that 'Megazine' I mocked up. It was like a pre-internet-internet for me!

Yaaas here's to us ✨

I also like how if you hover over the "leafs" it outlines what the graphic is made up of!

I also learnt something from looking at one of your blog posts...

https://sarajoy.dev/blog/color-scheme/

Never knew this CSS thingy existed, might use that later.

Well then that blog post worked exactly as I hoped it might, yay!

Also yes the shapes in the CSS art thinger - to begin with I was like aw, it's showing the shapes inside instead of the outlines... And then I decided that was a feature, not a bug 💜