V's Art and Design Page

Adventures in Web Design

8/21/2024: Hello again! I haven't added an entry to this page in a minute and I felt like I should write a new one. Since my last update (blog post? impromptu rant?), I've redesigned my site to a lovely cloudy sky theme, and I put my first fanpage up on the site :-)

Actually, I've been struggling to figure out what to call the pages I've been working on. The AEAVA definitely fits the term "fanpage", but I'm now working on a new page dedicated to talking about a TTRPG I enjoy. I've considered the terms sub-pages or sub-sites but I don't think those roll off the tongue very well. I don't know, it's just something I'll have to think on. Like everything on this site, organization is an ongoing project for me.

Anyway, I've been having a lot of fun designing stuff and putting more things I'm passionate about on the site. That's the update. See ya!

6/8/2024: It's a blast from the past! And by the past, I mean not even a year ago. Behold The Haunted Web as it was on July 29th, 2023 via The Wayback Machine (the only other page that still works from this era is the Credits page).

Look at all that stunning neon green! There are even older versions of the site (that aren't archived anywhere, as far as I know) that also go all in on green. It's my favorite color. I still really like the look of the old site... except for the links. I don't know what I was going for there.

I think it's cool that I've completed almost all of the items on those old to-do lists. I haven't added any fan pages/shrines, but I think that's because I haven't had an idea for one that I feel really passionate about. What is a fan page if not an act of passion?

Anyway, that's all for this entry. Check back next year when I look back at the site from this year and reminisce some more.

5/15/2024: I wasn't kidding about updates taking a while. Here's a rant on formatting for mobile. Currently, the Credits page is the only one that displays the way I want it to. Every other page squishes the Web format down to cell phone size. It's navigatible but not very pretty. How frustrating!

I have an idea of why this is, but not a solution as of yet. The difference between the Credits page and every other main page is that it only has one div at 100% width. It's one block that takes up the whole screen, essentially. There's code that should change all the divs to 100% width when a screen is small enough, but it doesn't work, at least on my phone.

Rant over. I'm going to do some more digging and see if I can finally figure this issue out.

5/15/2024 (but like, later): Aha! I successfully rubber-ducked myself! It was as simple as adding a little bit of code to the meta tag. Thank you W3 Schools viewport tutorial.

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 Web site 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).

Design Resources and Inspiration

If this gets long enough I'll eventually break it into categories.