Hello everyone! I’ve been working hard on this website these past days and finally everything’s up! So I thought it would be a good idea to summarize every change I’ve done here.

• Made the site more accessible: This was my priority! After playing around with CSS and customizing everything to my liking, I decided I was done with this website and moved on to work on my art site (I’ll talk more about this later!). In the past year I’ve started to make my art more accessible adding alt text everytime I can, especially to my full pieces, so it only made sense to make my art website accessible to screenreaders and keyboard users. Then I realized I should be doing that to my personal site too even if it’s just a hobby website! So here we are. I was nowhere close to being done with this website haha, I spent an entire day modifying my code to make everything as accessible as possible. I added an “skip to content” button, removed the web neko since it made keyboard navigation clunky, removed the marquees and moved the graphics to a graphic wall (I’ll miss them but it’s what had to be done!) and added alt text to all non-decorative images. I’m very happy that I figured out how to make everything work, and I really hope my efforts were worth it! But if any side of my site isn’t as accessible as the rest let me know in my neocities profile or in my guestbook :D I’ll try to fix everything!
• Added the graphics wall: I’m gonna be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of this section LOL but I wanted to have web graphics somewhere now that I removed the marquees. 
• Added dropdowns on the navigation menu: The nav was starting to be very cluttered and I would like to add more stuff in the future, so it was time to figure out how to make submenus. I decided to use a clickable dropdown instead of a hover dropdown to make it more accessible to keyboard users :D  Expect more sections to be added soon… hopefully LOL
• Made a sitemap: IDK I thought it would be nice to have everything organized and easy to access. You can find it on the footer of the main page (not on the footer of the blog)
• I still have to finish making the crochet gallery and the resources page… but it’ll be here ASAP

 

I think that’s all!

Anyway, as I mentioned before, I’ve also been working on my art site. You can actually find it on the navbar of the main page! Although it’s mostly empty for now, so you don’t have to go see it yet. That site is more “professional looking”, I did kind of a carrd-like layout so it looks less retro and more functional. My initial plan was using carrd anyway, but I’m not in a moment in which I can justify paying for a pro plan and the element limit was pissing me off, so, I decided to go back to my old portfolio neocities account and restart my site there. For many people, coding this from scratch would be very inconvenient, but I think making a static site from scratch has many positives, even if most of it could’ve been done on carrd anyway. 

First of all, I want to make subsections for all my projects. Doing that on a free carrd plan is near impossible and making a cool interactive site for people to engage with my projects is something I’d really like to do. Secondly, I can have a zonelets blog in it! And lastly, I just think coding my site is cool and it’s not like I plan to use it as a professional portfolio so it doesn’t really matter if it looks a bit too obviously hand coded by someone who’s obviously not a webdev lol 

There have been some inconveniences though. Well just one. The stupid art gallery. No matter how many times I try to code a fucking gallery it looks so bad and hard to navigate 😭 I’d like to add a little gallery with featured art for people who stumble upon my site for the first time, but ughhh it’s so hard to code something that looks good and is functional. I don’t know why galleries are something I struggle so much to code (is this a normal experience? or am I just dumb?), but I guess I’ll figure it out eventually… I hope so!

EDIT: Hey I figured it out! I found this gallery template which has been very helpful because I basically don’t have to code anything yippee! So now we also have a gallery section added :D This has been especially helpful for my art website though… It made everything so much easier and now I don’t have to worry about this again. I don’t plan to host my entire portfolio on neocities because that’d be too much work, too much storage needed, and I’m not that insane to do that to myself, but it’s great to be able to at least put a little gallery on there. END EDIT.

Talking about the art site, I wanted my art blog to have an RSS feed in case anyone wants to keep up with the site without following me on socmed, but I didn't really know how to make rss feeds work. Well for some reason I decided to browse the zonelets site again and saw ZoneRSS…. So I decided to use it to set up my RSS feeds! As of now, I have 3 feeds to update: the personal blog/website feed, the media log feed and the art blog feed. Setting the RSS feeds up was honestly a pain in the ass (i even ended up using a zonelets theme for the feed because styling it with my messy css was near impossible), but I hope it's worth it anyway! Even if nobody uses it, I like knowing I have a quick way to update it effortlessly just in case someone wants to follow it :] I didn't know about rss feeds until i joined neocities, but I think they're pretty cool and I wanted to have one on my sites too. 

If you want to keep up with site updates you can follow the blog RSS as it's the one I’ll use for general site updates! The media log one will be used for media post updates only, duh. Also I’ll let you know when the art site is ready via blog post + RSS feed ! I'm very excited to set everything up and start my art site, since that website is something I take more seriously since it’s where I plan to put everything about all my webcomic projects! But while I work on it, and because I don’t really share art on this site, you can check out my art on my socials (they’re on the links out section). 

I think that’s all I’ve been up to! I think I’m gonna start working on new art, so I probably won’t be updating this site as much for now. See you later! :3