V's Art and Design Page

Adventures in Web Design

Sites with asterisks (*) next to them feature flashing content.

1/11/2024: Ah, back in the old digs once again. I think this four month hiatus calls for an extended entry into this psuedo-blog. My biggest goal for this year, my New Year's resolution, if you will, is to create more custom graphics for this site. Are they coming any time soon?

No, probably not.

You see... I'm an anxious person, and my creative output is something I worry about a lot (and this is coming from a hobbyist, I couldn't imagine how people feel doing this as a job!). During my hiatus, I was reluctant to even look at NeoCities because the idea of starting work on my site again intimidated me so much! I've had to remind myself that art is a hobby, something to relieve stress, not cause it.

So, there'll be new stuff on the site, it'll just take some time to get here. The Haunted Web heartily endorses not drawing, writing, coding or crafting every so often to let yourself mellow out. Cheers!


8/27/2023: I finally got around to adding an alternate theme to my site, thanks to a tutorial from The Site Wizard. It uses cookies (well, just the one cookie, really) to save your theme selection across pages and visits. Currently it's set to save your selection for 30 days, but I might change that in the future. The light theme itself still needs tweaking to bring it up to The Haunted Web's high standards of web design, but I'm happy I found a pretty simple way to add this option.

8/22/2023: Computer-generated art... from 1999? While browsing through software on the Internet Archive, I found a nifty program called Reptile. It generates tiled backgrounds in various groovy abstract styles. You can download it from the Internet Archive (on Windows devices only, I believe). I had a lot of fun playing around with it. You can see some patterns I made in this mini image gallery. On a related note, I'm working on a page where you can upload images and preview how they'd look as a website background. It should be up some time this week.

Update: The preview page is up now! I also thought I should add that the image preview in Reptile can flash rapidly when generating images with some presets. It doesn't look like there's a way to disable that within the program itself.
Update to the Update: You can stop this rapid flashing by unchecking the 'animate' box in the preview option area.
8/11/2023: Did you know you can use keyboard shortcuts while coding on Neocities? I sure didn't! You can find a full list of them on the Ace code editor wiki, which is the editor Neocities uses. Here's a couple I found useful: 8/8/2023: I successfully hacked together a CSS marquee for my home page using this DEV guide. Pretty cool! I'm a big fan of those kinds of idiosyncratic web-things that have largely disappeared in recent years. The <marquee> function in HTML is apparently on its way out, so this version is made with CSS animations instead. I've been trying to recreate the 'old web' look here in a way that's still navigatible and accessible (thus, we have a marquee but not that <marquee>). I've been experimenting with other gizmos like that to add to this site.

8/4/2023: After figuring out how to run ISO files on my computer, I spent an hour trawling through old computer clip art. A lot of it was intended for use in retail or business settings, including graphics to promote highly specific events (Pre-Winter Sale, Going Into Business Sale, End of the Decade Deals, and so on). There were also dozens of designs in a folder dedicated to frames, which I thought was pretty cool. I even nabbed one of them to use on this site (check out the updates section on my home page).