what i broke this week

the alleged dyslexia won again

this probably should have been several smaller updates, but before i knew it i had three half-finished new pages to finalize.

initially i just wanted to create a links page to credit the sites i took inspiration from, which ended up being a public bookmarks bar full of random things that i think are notable. then i figured that i had just made the CSS to style lists so why not make a page to list the files i'm sharing? the HTML/CSS was a five minute job, but this "quick" idea became weeks of fixing my damn network and compressing files. during this, i decided i wanted to link to a bittorrent guide and went on another "quick" mission to find one. but what do you know? i ended up writing one myself and it eventually went a bit off the rails and became a manifesto. i'm not mad at it, i just wish these "quick" ideas were actually quick once in a blue moon.

debugging my network took so long that i made a youtube channel and properly uploaded a shitpost for the first time (why are thumbnails so hard to make??). i also had a moment of kindness in the interim and decided my fake out PC specs page was too much and canned it. well... maybe "canned" is too far... i'm sure if you look for it you can find it again ;). since i removed the fake out, i also decided to combine my spec pages so that you can see all of my horrible decisions at once. i also also added a photo of my homelab (computer pic probably never because that requires me to clean my crow's nest of a desk setup (if you think the homelab is dusty you ain't seen nothing yet)).

in smaller techy changes, i switched from divs to semantic tags for the main content and sidebar to hopefully make it a tiny bit more accessible (i know the CSS is fucked on displays that aren't vaguely computer monitor shaped, and i'll get to it one day), made the sidebar "sticky" so now it won't break when the content is taller than a page, and switched from python to npx for development because for some fucking reason python's HTTP module sucks at routing. in larger techy changes, speaking of "getting to it one day", i made an RSS feed! turns out it's just XML and not some horrifying beast of a format like i feared. the feed for this changelog and the ones for my socials can be found at feeds. there's also a new 404 page that, hopefully, you'll never encounter :).

how'd that happen?

anyways, a week ago i dusted off this folder and got to work cleaning up the mess one-year-ago me left. i changed (or.. made?) the file structure and then had to update all the links accordingly (a smarter man would have used grep and some regex but i have caffeine and the mountain goats on loop with far too much free time). during that, i removed the placeholder navigation links (i don't think "placeholder" applies to things that have existed for a year but oh well) and added some disclaimers in the form of buttons (plus another that i found while gathering ideas, thanks again to petrapixel).

i spent today finally setting up git to push to a codeberg repository as well as neocities using hooks, but i have no idea if that works yet because the first new update will be this very changelog. as you may have already guessed, i also added a changelog. i couldn't decide if i wanted a quick, user-friendly bulleted list of frontend-only changes or a blog-like entry talking about my experience updating the site, so you get both. one day i hope to add an RSS feed so that there's a way to get actual time-based updates, but not today.

let's hope that another year-long break won't happen again now that i've figured out git hooks and finished my CS bachelor's (both equally difficult achievements).