hypermedia circus

cohost went readonly a couple days ago. that's a tragedy. cohost was a good site, and one that proved if anything, it's actually totally viable to ban bigots and pedophiles from your website on sight and maintain a community. this is something people are too chickenshit to do in search of eternal growth. cohost will be remembered fondly.

but its death did convince me to get up off my ass and clean up this site.

so let's talk technicals.

the original neocities layout was really stupid. in the sense of "not being very smart". i don't even remember what dumb position i fabricated as the train barreled down the tracks to justify keeping it as low-technology as it was, but there's something beautiful about clinging to your ideals, saying "sure, i'll edit every page by hand." is a noble vision. it's also fucking stupid, right. there's a lot of tools that exist exactly for this kind of thing, and not using them because they are named stupid things like "jekyll" just kind of... it's weird. when we say poob has it for you, we forget poob does in fact have it for you.

that said, here's some names i've encountered while looking through ways to build my site out using more modern technology:

Plotly's famous Dash product a low-code framework for building apps in Python
Quarkus some kind of Java platform? i don't use java.
Horcrux a Jekyll plugin that generates galleries, comes with the tagline "photo is the horcrux of memory".
Floobits a plugin for multiplayer code editing
dotnet Blazor fragments i never did learn what this is.

of course, i didn't wind up using any of these, but i can absolutely imagine use cases for it. i have a lot of complex feelings about that kind of fantasy - it's a fantasy of not needing any of those things. i don't want to call it luddite. but it is definitely... a fantasy, right? be it the fantasy of being the kind of person who can maintain an entire static codebase, or the fantasy of that codebase being 1:1 with as it's seen. but i am disabled, and am limited in the amount of work i can do, and more than that, i like having things be easy, even when they're things i can do.

that said, in this process i did learn about stuff that was useful.

jekyll, a static site generator
flask, a very light python web framework
tailwind, a css framework that kind of does a yugioh retrain to inline styling
htmx, a library that extends html to enable better ajax, reducing the amount of javascript needed

i find when i want to learn something, i do my best by playing with the tools at the lowest level, and then once i would know how to do so myself, i let others abstract it for me. this is something i learned with game development. i started with love2d, which is just barely more than a set of lua bindings for sdl, and then moved to godot only once i was sure i could do almost everything godot does for me. (i am still no good at graphics programming or 3d development, but that's life.)