setting up a blog

[signfrog]

so im starting a blog/library website and i have a few questions. 

1. how can i make posts to my website without pasting the text into html paragraphs every time? is there a way to do that in an easier way?

2. how do you put the nav bar on the side?

3. how do you add in a loading animation between pages? im working on a little train passing loop that i want to use kind of like the elevators here

thanks for any help!

- signfrog

[Absentmind]

Hiya, really cool that you want to start a blog! there are many ways to do this however and with the questions you are asking, I am going to assume you are a complete beginner!

1) Short answer for a beginner: No,

Unless you build a blog using more advanced languages like PHP or JS, you're going to have to copy and paste it, Sorry! Alternatively you could look to build your blog using WordPress but you that's a learning curve in itself if you want to go that route. If your goal is to have a very simple blog then this may be a good way to go.

2) I would look up how to use CSS Flexbox and/or CSS grid for this. Without having your website's html and css, it's hard to show you what you need to do.

A little tip: you can go on a website you like the layout of and right click > inspect to see how they achieved it themselves.

3) You can achieve this with Javascript, but I'll leave it to you to research how to do it! .

Hopefully this is a helpful nudge in the right direct! If you need anymore help feel free to reply to this post or DM me

[crazyroostereye]

For your first Question, you could learn Markdown, which you can later convert fairly easily into HTML snippets with a Converter.

For the Other things, it's a bit more complicate and needs you to Learn HTML/CSS/JS as Absentmind already Mentioned.

What you could try out if you are a Beginner is to look into Static Site Generators like Hugo, where you can place Markdown Pages in a Folder and it generates your Site based on a template. Which you can customize fairly easily.

[Melooon]

1. I think @crazyroostereye markdown suggestion is a very good option for a blog. The main alternative I would offer for consideration would be to use a retro solution like FrontPage, its a program from the early 00s and it lets you write documents in an editor like Word, then export them as HTML webapges you can upload to neocities! You can find it on archive.org here (be sure to read the comments for serials and install tips) - the code it gives you will be an older style of HTML, but its still a great first step to learning and making a start!

2. As a beginner I think that frames are a very good and simple way to get started with things like navs, they allow you to setup your site with a single navbar that will be the same on every page and you wont need to update it each time you make and edit - it also pairs very well with FrontPage - you can move on to something more modern and complex later, but frames are a very good way to get started: https://wiki.melonland.net/frames

3. I would suggest not worrying about this one for now; the elevator uses a lot of tricks and scripts that are not suited for a beginner site  Get the basics of 1 and 2 sorted first!

Good luck!