Some years ago, I booted up my dad's computer late at night and played a really nice RPGmaker game (using the play-in-browser function, because I dared not download anything to his PC). Scrolling down, I realized the developer had a personal website on something called neocities. It would be no exaggeration to say that clicking on that link changed my life. I was overwhelmed with what I saw. I went through their buttons, clicked next and next and next on webrings, read tons of introductions on index pages of all shapes and colors. I had no idea there were still so many people out there coding their own websites. It was truly amazing. And to me, who didn't know the first thing about coding, it seemed like magic.
Time passed. I began to take my dad’s shitty laptop to my room to “study” until I eventually got squatter's rights on it, but I remained with the tech literacy of a grandma. I have to admit that I only learned how to properly use a computer because I wanted to play eroge on it, and I couldn't very well ask for my brother's help with something like that.
One day, among one of many tumblr-will-end scares (they've only gotten more frequent since 2018…) I saw a post on there compiling resources for beginners to create a neocities page. I wondered for the first time if I could actually make something like those websites I saw that day. Something my very own.
I started by reading the mdn web docs. Even something as simple as “a website is a file in a directory somewhere” was mind-blowing to me.
My only prior experience with html was a single day in middle school computer class, where I made a very basic website that displayed nothing but unreadable text on the sort of garish gradient background only 12-year-olds could come up with (or bear looking at). When I made my neocities account, my website ended up looking like this:
I like to call this the beta version.
I immediately set out looking for a template, and ended up with the first Google result, the trusty old neothemes 01 layout:
Looking at it again, it feels insane how far I've come…
I have an odd relationship with that star background. As soon as I saw it, I knew I wanted to use it on the index page and the hibichika shrine—the website is called starlit marmalade, after all—but I never got it to stick, because it turned out to be an eyesore. I was going to use it on this page for nostalgia’s sake but ended up giving up on the idea because, again, eyesore.
I don't have screenshots of what the other pages looked like, but I never finished making all the ones I put out on the little navigation menu. I have no screenshots of the few other existing pages(and I'm too lazy to go get the files up and screenshot them), but they were all made with sadgrl's layout builder(and my blood and tears, since I didn't know the first thing about what I was doing), except the manga page (which I kept through V2 with some slight tweaks and retheming). Looking back, I was doing the coding equivalent of Shirou building a new magic circuit whenever he wanted to do a spell—let’s be glad none of that survived.
Since the site was ugly and sucked to use, I ended up forgetting about it for maybe less than a year? When I came back, I still didn't know what I was doing, but it was leagues ahead of my first attempts. I went for a different pre-made layout this time (no longer available on the author’s website), and made it into what I began to call V2:
Very clearly made during my short-lived di-gi-charat phase
This was the first time I was actually proud of my website. I truly had a blast here.
Now, look at the picture again. See that navigation column on the side? There was a pretty limited number of tables I could put on there, and since I didn't know how dropdown menus worked, I decided to make the links lead to splash pages in which you could pick from two options. I had fun making all the new layouts, but this turned the website into a veritable labyrinth:
God forbid you wanted to see my sole tokusatsu review (or go to the then-empty TV drama page)
Around this time I also made the site open on a splash page, making sure that any visitor is always at least one extra click away from what they wanted to see.
Once I realized the monster I'd created, I began to think about v3. Many of the pages used templates, and while there's nothing wrong with that, I wanted to make something out of scratch, no matter how rough it might turn out. I spent several hours on vscode, testing out different layouts that never came to fruition. It was a frustrating process, half because I had no idea of what I wanted the final product to look like, half because I didn't really know what I was doing either way. Besides, the site was in a perfectly usable condition already, so there wasn't any real need to do this, unlike with the transition from v1 to V2.
My original plans were to repurpose the animanga page (it ended up becoming the shrines index) as a splash page, and do something Chobits themed in the homepage.
This somehow turned into an index page featuring the protagonist of my least-favorite Nitro+Chiral VN (which I did not even have plans to read once I started working on the first prototype for v3!):
I was too lazy to switch it out so you get santa aoba here forever
I love the colors, but the fact that it didn't look like the DMMD UI one bit started keeping me up at night. I remade it with assets from the game, then realized that I was using a rhyme background and the rhyme segments have a completely different UI, so I remade it again, which means that nowadays we're technically in v3.3—but let's not get caught up in version numbers. I'm still no good at coding for the most part, but right now, it's the website of my dreams.
The basic structure is still pretty much the same but it does look different enough that I was compelled to add a screenshot here
Most of the pages I made from V2 remain (some repurposed), and v3 somehow ended up with two pages themed after Black Butler, which might be even more unexpected than the three pages themed after Touken Ranbu. I've grown and changed a lot over the past three or so years, and I enjoy seeing this reflected in the look of the website. There's older pages that would look completely different if I were making them today, and in another year, I'll probably be decorating new pages with webps of characters that the me of today has never heard about. One day, I'll get sick of this entire version too, and start a new one from scratch all over again. I wonder what it will be like…
Also, here's my old buttons, just for fun:
I remember being really unhappy with that first one back when I made it, but now it's kind of nostalgic. I've actually grown to like it quite a bit.