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website relaunch, astro, standard.site and why i'm doing this all!

so, we’re writing everything from the ground up again! welcome to the v1 changelog of my silly little website.

notes on what, when, why and how.

changelog v1.0

i pondered either to call it a 2.0 or a 3.0 but since the other versions were built on hopes, dreams, and duct tape, i will take them as alfa and beta versions

structure

changes

  • most pages are offline, being rewritten
  • no longer an accessibility nightmare!
  • blog!!
  • it’s actually easy to maintain now lol

planned

  • about the website
  • maybe a better ‘about me’
  • media page
  • credits and resources
  • /now, /ideas, and /bookmarks pages
  • linking to my friends
  • dark mode
  • a lot of blog posts

why i even started it

re-learning html/css to have my own website was an amazing experience! my own little corner on the world wide web… to be honest, i wasn’t one of the cool kids with a cool blog, i learned my css by trying to make my tumblr theme look as cursed as i needed it to be. while i’m no longer on tumblr, i always missed how customizable it was.

to be fair, i’m not even that big of a social media guy. i was on orkut, then on tumblr. i hopped on instagram and facebook for a bit because of school friends but it sucked. don’t even mention the tiktok era, the pandemic did weird shit to all of us. i joined twitter because people said it was good for the vtuber stuff and it was fucking miserable. now i’m on fedi and bluesky, but more because i got nerd-sniped than anything else (topic for a different blog post tho).

the whole indie web and making your own website movement did grab me big time, i wanted a place to share my own stuff without having to navigate inconsistent algorithms. i also ended up realizing that i don’t care about impressions, i just like making shit. so i went on a journey to make my own website.

having the liberty to do whatever you want to is great, but it becomes a mess real damn fast. the previous website was a navigation nightmare! (i told this to some people, but my side/navbar is a fucking iframe lmao.) the colours are bad and it’s so fucking broken, but it was what was needed for me to get a kickstart.

why is everything so different?

i wasn’t planning to go for such a minimalist look at first, but i guess some constraint is good. i’m not even sure what i wanted my website to look like anymore? i hated my colours, i had no idea what was going on in my html, my css was even worse, it didn’t work on mobile (it barely worked on desktop tbh), and i really just needed to start over.

going with an already existing colour theme took some of the stress of the design off my shoulders, it is pretty clean and it allows for dark mode in the future. the design is not final tho, this will always be a work in progress and i plan on bringing a lot more personality into it! but i’m now following the “just do it, you can fix it later” policy for myself.

on building with astro

jb (jbc.lol) had actually recommended me astro almost an year ago after seeing the disaster that my code was, but I didn’t actually know how to use a framework. astro looks really scary at first and i panicked. now i’m on it and it’s actually stupidly simple to use and it’s making my life so much easier.

astro allows me to use templates, which is fucking awesome! it also has zero built-in javascript on shipping! unlike other frameworks… it’s great, i fixed my navigation nightmare situation and it also makes blogging so much simpler (it allows markdown!!).

the real reason i finally decided to dive into it tho is because i wanted to build my site on standard.site, and there’s an astro plugin that would help with that. the funniest part? i found something that works better than the plugin (and doesn’t depend on astro) lmao. but it’s great that i decided to go for astro, i have zero regrets.

i couldn’t be happier with it, i can finally focus on the actual stuff on the site instead of spending way too much time structuring my pages. everything just works.

here’s their website: astro.build

the fuck is standard.site tho

well, i did say i got nerd-sniped. it’s a shared lexicon for atproto that basically works as an overpowered RSS. it ensures that my blog posts live on my PDS and are tied to my atproto identity, while still allowing me to have them fully hosted on my website. it is also easily discoverable on standard.site readers! real cool shit

you can check standard.site for the full documentation thing if you want

atproto is so cool i’m gonna explode

final thoughts

i’m so back motherfuckers