Migrating to 11ty (and a mental health update)

Hi. Yeah. I changed my website layout again :P

Sorry for going MIA for like… two months? In my defense I was going through a major Episode (not sure which kind) and now I'm sort of falling back to webdev to regain crumbs of normalcy and learning.

Anyways! Lot's of things happening. I'm jumping from project to project, hobby to hobby, as a result of My Episode. I sort of deserted you all for a moment there…

First up, the blog is up and running! I'm using 11ty because I saw some people on neocities recommending it. Aha. Ahahaha. Little did I know it will cause much distress.

Part One: It's a Blog Michael, How Long Would It Take?

In hindsight, equipped only with HTML, CSS, and sparse knowledge of JavaScript was not enough to carry me to use 11ty. That's honestly my fault but then again nobody in tech ever warns you about this stuff. Back to the story; I naively thought something advertised as "simple and lightweight" would have an easy onboarding process. Apparently I am a big dumb stupid baby. I was immediately thrown off the deep end with new stuff to learn like... nunjucks? terms like liquid? markdown? and... I don't even want to recall.Frustrated with the shit ton of things I needed to install beforehand (yes I hate installing dependencies I hate node.js etc etc etc) I followed the tutorial and took the base blog as a jumping off point. This is where I should have gone back to learning JS and the other jargon they said in the docs

It took me... three? four? business days to figure out how 11ty worked. And even then I know fuck-all. I only know surface level tweaks and whatever they wrote on the documentation that is labeled as "beginner" or "the easy mode."

After trying to implement my Blog into my existing static website, it all crumbled because I couldn't figure out the moving parts and how to isolate the input and outputs to ONE specific sub folder. Apparently I needed "permissions" and "a port" to "run the app."

Part Two: I kind of buried the lede here

So what am I doing, trying to "automate" a process that I was content with, hand-updating my RSS feed and all? Well. To be frank. Uhm. I. I sort of did this to chicken out of the job hunting process.

Oops!

See, In December I promised myself I'd seriously start considering getting a regular office job beginning in January. This just meant applying to many job offerrings and tracking them in a spreadsheet.

Well. Turns out. The Episode happened for at least two months. I spiralled out of control. I picked up at least 5 different hobbies in a short span of time, and when I did try to enter the rhythm of job hunting, I deluded myself into thinking a dedicated website would be a great portfolio and CV.

Ahem. Dear reader. I do not work in webdev. This is just one of my many pet projects.

Oh well! Might as well finish what I started!

Part Three: Back to the future

So we're back in my bedroom where I'm still hand-updating every CSS detail imaginable, trying to find vanilla JS scripts and, hell, even pure CSS colutions to my problems, because I love the static web. I love not having to deal with servers and all of its intricacies. The computer is not for me to meddle in.

The 4 business days learning 11ty was, frankly, a blur. I asked my dad to help me set up the "dynamic" part of my website and we settled on the blog before the catdya in the url. To make the separation part of things easier. Again, I cannot and do not want to tinker with the 11ty configuration because it scared me.

After nearly calling it quits, I managed to still keep and run my static part of the web. The blog is (so far) the only semi-automated Thing on my website.

Come to think of it, most people (on neocities, at least) blog using zonelets before jumping to a more dynamic option. I totally skipped the zonelets part of learning. Huh.

Part Four: Wait I thought we were already in the future?

My future plans for this site include but are not limited to:

1. Finishing all of my main pages (this includes the art archive and OC pages, which I have been putting off)

2. Setting up a proper portfolio of my projects (I guess so I have “something to show for”)

3. Adding more stuff in the "shrines" or "fun" category

4. Slowly. SLOWLY adding more JS and dynamic parts to my website

Now. If you'll excuse me, I have many pages to migrate and many more I have to make.