the evergreen gardens

1 month special

song of the day:

today marks february 15th, 2024, meaning one thing, it has been a month since i started working on this neocities website! i wanted to take the time to write this blog post and just, think about what working on this little project has been like and what i think.

firstly though, i bet you didn't know, but i DID have a neocities page before, it used to be unitc00k13d0ugh.neocities.org back in 2021. as you can see, it is completely empty, but i swear it used to have actual stuff in it, mainly pertaining to self-shipping and kinnie stuff, but one day, i thought "hey, i wanna overhaul my site, lets clear everything out and then get to work!"

yeah that never came to fruition.

so one day, i happened to check out one of my friend's sites, specifically nephro, and its amazing site feeling machine. i was heavily inspired by the aesthetics and how everything was arranged. i wanted to be able to express thoughts on a lot of things, but lots of sites like twitter just feel so limited, with thing such as character limits, no customization options, etc. yeah some sites are better, such as tumblr allowing html on your blog, but it feels like it has taken a huge chunk of its focus away from that. and dont even get me started on carrd and how awkward it feels to use. i felt like that with neocities, since html is the main star of the show, i would have the utmost control of how i present my ideas and thoughts. hell i didn't even care about the whole "le webcore 90's core!" circlejerk a lot of kids seem to have about neocities. i just like the idea of how customizable it is. i can make my site look as absolutely disgusting as i wanted, and no one can really stop me. so it was then i decided, hey, let's actually work on this thing!

initally i expressed my desire in november, but it took until mid-january that i pushed myself to actually register my domain, which used to be "evergreenmeadows.neocities.org". it was around 9 pm, and i started chipping away, using only the bare knowledge i had from neocities simple tutorial. this was the result of about 30 minutes of initial work.
screenshot of the evergreen gardens in its infancy
very bare minimum, a header, a paragraph, an image, and a list of stuff. VERY ELEMENTARY SHIT. after that i then immediately shifted focus on working on my self shipping page, which looked a little something like this:
screenshot of the self ship page in its beginning stages
still bare bones, but i had some pretty stuff in it at least! finally i worked on a page for changelog, because im the type of person who really likes to look back and see their own growth. and after that, i wrapped it up for the day. i was heavily satisfied with the work i had done in a couple of hours, and went to charge myself (sleep) for the night.

from then on, it was a lot of small adjustments, like someone slowly chipping away at a model kit or something like that. about 2 weeks into the site making, i had a major overhaul to the site's visuals, so it no longer was just in a solid, colored void. there was an actual sense of style in it now, and it felt more like my own site for the first time, instead of the average amateur's site.
screenshot of the first draft of the visual overhaul
from then on, it was more small bits of work, from expanding the self shipping and kinnie page, to working on my fnf-focused pages, joining a few webrings, a guestbook, blog, a lot had been added over the course of a month!
so, after recalling everything that happened, what do i think about neocities, working with html and css, and the overall idea of personal sites?
i think it's fantastic, working with html on neocities has been an absolute blast for the past month, and thanks to just how OLD html is, there are so, SO MANY RESOURCES online dedicated to it, since its such a vital piece of the internet. its so easy to get into, and i highly encourage so many people to just, give it a shot. you do NOT have to make it look great on the first try, which is what i did, make it simple, and work on visuals later, focus on having the shit you want on there first before tweaking its looks. and do NOT BE AFRAID to use references, or more specifically, go onto another site on neocities, right click the page and click "view page source (on firefox at least, not sure on other browsers)" to view the actual code of the site, and don't just drag and paste the code, that's straight up stealing. what i'm referring to is just simply looking at the code to figure out how some things work, and then appplying that knowledge to your own site. i've done it a lot thanks to the sites of my oomfies nephro and hoonis. i am heavily thankful lol.

in conclusion, if you ever wanted to make a page that is 100% your own, give neocities a shot, a really good resource has to be w3schools since it is basically an entire html/css learning resource, nearly everything is in there if you look hard enough. that's all for today, thanks for reading if you happened to!