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.
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.
Notice: The image preview in Reptile can flash rapidly when generating images. You can turn this off by unchecking the 'animate' box in the preview option area.
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:
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.
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).