First post

03/06/25

This is the first post I've written on the website, so if you are reading this, then welcome and thank you for visiting! I want to write about why I'm posting on Neocities to begin with, and what I hope to turn this space into in the future.
If you miraculously happen to be one of the first 190 people who visited, then you may remember that this website has been sitting dormant for a while. I registered on Neocities on the 12th of March, and until now, the main page was some template from elm-pages. Originally, I wanted to build this website with Elm because I love the language, and it has some great libraries for doing UI. As great as Elm is, I ultimately decided against it for a few reasons:

• It's not the right language for the job
• I was tired of fussing around with tooling
• I wanted the site to be accessible to people without Javascript
• I realized I didn't actually know plain HTML/CSS that well

Long story short, I did spend quite a while trying to set up a blog using elm-land at first. However, after reading the documentation, it became clear that elm-land was more suited for interactible web applications rather than blog-like static pages such as this one. I did some googling and found out about elm-pages. After setting it up, I decided that it was far overkill for what I needed and introduced unneeded complexity. After a while, I realized that I'd spent about 3 hours messing with different frameworks, compilers, nix flakes, etc. and 0 hours working on the website - I had literally nothing to show for my efforts. This problem isn't new to me; I am very prone to over-engineering things, spending hours abstracting and refactoring stuff, losing sight of the original goal, only to step back and have to confront the sad fact that I'd spent hours working and got nothing noticeable done. However, I believe that bad habits can be undone with consistent and deliberate effort, so finally, I decided to go with the simplest possible tools that would be sufficient and just start making something.

That brings us here. At the time of writing, this is a completely unstyled website with 3 pages, but that's still better than having nothing! I don't want it to stay like this forever, obviously. I definitely have some stuff that I'd like to add in the future. Here's a quick list:

• A sitemap
• A changelog
• A guestbook. This one will be trickier, because you need something on the back-end to receive, store, and retreive comments. And then, on top of that, you have to remember that all user input is evil, so you need a spam filter... there's lots of challenges here. Thankfully, there's lots of free guestbook services to use online that do all this heavy lifting for you, but I still think it could be fun to try and roll one from scratch.
• More content! I want this website to be a place where I can post and discuss my hobby projects, as well as other interests. I could make some more interactive pages for people to play around with. I could also use this space to bookmark cool websites, recipes, music, media, etc. Perhaps I could even write some tutorials/resources for programming or math.
• Some kind of styling. Something that really appealed to me about Neocities pages are all the unqiue decorations, layouts, sounds, buttons, and so on. You can tell that each site had a lot of effort and attention poured into it. Right now, I don't have a very strong idea about how I want mine to look, but I still want to add some basic styling. This is because, by default, the font size is super small and the paragraphs span the entire width of the screen. This makes reading everything a massive pain, especially on a widescreen monitor. Ideally, I'd like these long posts to have the text centered in the middle third of the screen, with the outer thirds used for something else.

In order to actually have something on the website, I decided to make the boids algorithm. You can find the page here. It's not done yet though, I still want to add some fun features that make it more interactive, such as sliders to tweak the parameters, and perhaps making the boids fly away from the mouse pointer.

Anyway, that's everything I have to say for now. Until next time.