Helloooooooooo world!
Updates
- 13 March 2024: Whoa! Somehow two years have passed since my last update here... Sorry about that!
Actually, I've spent that meantime figuring out eleventy and learning how to maintain and update a blog via my main website at paulcapewell.com. But I love the Letters page here and I still have a massive fondness for how they render. So I'd like to continue to update them. Here? On my main website? I'm not sure. I sort of see this as something of an experimental space and my main website as my more serious one.
Anyway, I'm updating this to point out the fact that although I haven't updated the website here for two years, I do use neocities every week or so to check up on people I follow here, and to find new sites that inspire and delight. It's actually even gotten to the point that I have about a dozen or so websites hosted via neocities, but who don't use RSS, that I check using ye olde worlde method of - gasp - opening a bookmarks folder and regularly visiting them to see if they've been updated!
I should really get round to posting a blogroll of some of these websites for others to see...
Anyway, this is all by way of a kind note from fri11s (whose website is gorgeous!), who kindly followed me and dropped me a note and indirectly reminded me that my neocities website is gathering dust, and needs said dust blowing off it! (And a shout-out is also due to sneek, who I've followed for probably three years or more, and who it was that linked to fri11s recently. Her website is also great - I love her candid blogging/journalling, and her website is absolutely one in the aforementioned links folder! - 10 April 2022: Progress! I decided I want to write letters rather than blog posts. So I'm having a go at 'working in public'* on the Letters page - over time I hope I hope to come up with a DIV style I can apply to my letters and just style them easily. And most of all I want them to look like letters. Hopefully that will make them feel more like letters, both for me when I write them, and for you when you read them. We'll see how that goes.
* This is something I've seen others do, particularly with web projects, and I like it because it helps others learn along at the same time, and it's a process that feels right somehow for a web project. It's never finished, so just keep working on it. - 7 April 2022: Oh no! Many more months have passed. To be honest, I'm not sure if I will continue with this scratchpad-ass website as I think I'd prefer something different. But it's tradition now.
I've been so inspired by so many people on neocities that I keep wanting to make a site sort of like one of theirs... But when I think what it is I like about them it's the differences I like most - so how do I make my own? It needs some thought. Maybe this is my own? To be continued... - 5 October 2021: Hi! Sorry. This didn't go to plan. You see, I just got bored one day and dumped my extant hackspace website code to a neocities profile, planning to update it all for neocities. But I haven't done that yet. So this is just a broken website for now. Sorry about that. I'll be back, I promise.
- 24 November 2020: Hi, hackspace. Wow, I just had to update to acknowledge/record the discovery (by me) of a blog/personal website that just struck a chord (har har) with me and features an idea that I just need to... steal? That's too strong a word - but it's something I absolutely want to incorporate somehow.
evy's garden is a lovely place to spend some time, and she has a number of really interesting and creative ideas and sections. She seems to be one of those multi-talented folks who can turn their hand to many things. Anyway, on a broad level, the introduction to her garden is most instructive:
and it's hard to imagine a better description of a personal website/project than this...gardens are cool
you plant a seed, and help cultivate an environment for it to grow, but you can't really control exactly how it ends up growing
they are always changing, never a finished polished project
it's this little ecosystem, various parts of the garden affect other parts, as some plants die they provide nourishment for others
ANYWAY the main element of her site that struck me as an 'omg of course!' feature was her little random jukebox of songs. So simple! She has a collection of songs that needed a home or way to be played, and I have a collection of field recordings that have a similar need... Watch this space. - 20 November 2020: Hello! This update (and, honestly, reminder to myself that this hackspace even exists) brought to you by a couple of things: this intriguing collection of < 1mb websites which made me wonder if this site is less than 1mb... and of course it is. Actually, so is my main website, which surprised me (at least until the lazyloading images pop in when you scroll, but still!). And also brought to you, as usual, by Kicks Condor talkin' bout good old fashioned directories and so forth. This has in turn led me to read a bunch of other people's handcoded blogs and websites and it just makes me wanna continue!
I guess also it's because I havent't thought about any of this stuff for ages, and have just settled back into the comfy routine of reading other people's blogs, and occasionally updating mine via wordpress. Which is fine. Particularly if, as I say, it apparently runs under 1mb on first load. Can't be bad. The temptation is there to make a more retro layout, but... eh. Maybe some combo of a handcoded WP layout using WP's dynamic loveliness? - 9 June 2020: I haven't forgotten about you, Hackspace! Really I've just been trying to think what I want to do with this space and thanks to Neocities and so on, one idea is a series of very late 90s, early 2000s fansites for some of my favourite things - the kind of place with a hamfisted synopsis, some stolen artwork, and links to a small number of 1024px wallpaper images and icons. HMM.
- 4 June 2020: Page created! This page, set of pages, sub-domain - none of it existed yesterday, or any day in history before that! Isn't that amazing?!
Footnote
This site currently borrows heavily from the code kindly made available by Parimal here. Thanks, Parimal!
Indeed, the creation of this digital playground was inspired by his recent essay, Rediscovering the Small Web, and many other recent blog posts, websites, forum posts and general trends.