I broke apart my site and then put it back together differently so I would like it more.
Blog script from Zonelets.
The header image on the travel journal is from loading.io/animation/text.
Icons from flaticon.com, the rest of the layout was created/coded by me. This was a layout I used on a previous site (blog) and then adapted to use for my KB here.
I used ChatGPT to create a Twitter-inspired layout. My prompt:
can you code a twitter-inspired clone layout using HTML and a separate style.css file? Please match twitter based on how it looked before it became x.com, with a simple blue and white interface
I modified from there to create the layout, including adding Javascript to make the "Tweet" button deliver a response. Prompt for that:
can you write code so when someone clicks the Tweet button, they get a pop-up message that i can customize
I used Google Sheets to make this, inspired by maegaze.space, which I found via are.na.
I loved V1 too much and wanted to reuse it for something else, so I reused it for this. See below for credits.
Oops I put a red mark in the first image, I guess it's just like that now.
Instead of "coding like 1999" I wanted to open a page I made in 1999 and update it for this site. That seems like the easiest/fastest way to get back into that groove (for me) because I would be able to immediately see the limits and find where I left off creatively.
I found a 2005 HTML layout from my archives and started with that. I wanted to start with something MUCH older, but I couldn't find any good examples of code that was already started for me -- my pre-2005 sites are archived on floppy disks.
I'm still going to hunt down my archives and maybe my next layout will look older. This layout was "born" in Feb 2005 during my last few years of college. I knew a little CSS but I didn't know about keeping a separate "stylesheet" file yet. Because of this, the CSS is encoded into EACH PAGE, so any time I need to update a style, I have to update all of them. (The part of my brain that understands good content strategy is screaming, but it's worth it for the authenticity.)
Things adopted from sites pre-2005: Table layout, iframe layout, gifs, basically everything in the toybox, the background, guestbook, random images of things I own floating in space
Instead of intending to do a layout that was "old" looking, I just used my most basic skillz to build this layout, but also did the kind of research one might have done in 1998 when building a new site: Click around other people's sites for HTML guidance and ideas, and combine all of the cool looking things into your site. (I also did some Google searching, which is cheating.)
In the spirit of myself circa 1998-2004, I mish-mashed a bunch of things I thought were neat into this one layout, which has turned out to look kind of dull. I still like it and I'll improve it over time! I am going for a spooky feel, I just need to learn more about coding and get better at editing images.
Built using NotePad++ on my computer and hosted by Neocities.