did you know web dev can be fun?

this last year i've been getting really into web development. i had the responsibility of coding the website for the fruity rumpus asshole factory, a licensing label for homestuck fan works that allows them to make money off of merchandise and legally use the homestuck brand for fan work, as well as a forum. the forum is just okay, but here's a delicious preview for the next update. it, too, is getting a visual overhaul.

i first learned web development as a skill as part of inching my way into what i really wanted to do - game development. all code is the same, right? haha, no. there are game dev problems that can only be explained by "you tried to get a react guy to write a game" and web dev problems that can only be explained by "you tried to get a games programmer to write a website".

but in 2010 i was actively learning code. and all code is the same right up until it's not. my first credit on something was when i was but a scant 14 years old, and it was a stylesheet for an imageboard script. in those days, you would change the site stylings by writing a css file called blank.css which defined spacings and then you would also include futaba.css or burichan.css

for some reason or another, this method didn't stick around. wonder why. it works. it works beautifully. if you're rendering html like a normal person. unfortunately these days we have react. but that doesn't mean i'm not having fun! i'm having a lot of fun. i've finally found a good median, a solid middle of the road, where i get access to all the best web development stuff and also don't have to deal with the worst web development stuff. it's really, really nice.

so full disclosure, here's the new website stack:

• this site is generated using astro
• the content on this site is managed using keystatic
• there are features in this site that use htmx as interactivity
• the styling is done with tailwind in most cases
• that is all generated and pushed out to neocities

i found the astro + keystatic pairing really, really agreeable. it's almost exactly what i'd like out of a website management tool where i'm not writing business logic and interpreting user input. it makes it all extremely fast, extremely fluid, and downright fun to make sites with. and in that case… i honestly forgot that making websites could be fun in its own right.

keystatic and markdoc make writing actually really fun and flexible. compare this to payload, which i do quite like, but lacks flexibility, and it's obviously better, especially for my use cases, which tend to be bullshitting and uploading art and doing things really, really quickly. i find astro and keystatic to be the almost perfect weight; quick to install, quick to set up, and quick to get developing. it may become the gold standard for static site development.

the downside is that keystatic is not very maintained - the discord is dead, the last updates were years ago. and while i'm not necessarily against keystatic just continuing to exist in this state, since locally installed keystatic isn't actually a security issue, it's a static site generator, there are things i'd like out of it. stuff like caching collections, better handling of slugs, lots of little things.

but keystatic is good, right now.

that is correct, i have already begun a rewrite of the bdth site using astro and keystatic. the future is here.

but here i am, in 2026. and i'm updating my neocities. this page is nearly a decade old. there's a lot of writing i don't necessarily stand by, there's a lot of stuff that has aged better than i expected. all the old blog posts can be found in the archive. this includes a lot of writing on homestuck, and a lot of postmortems for indie projects that never went anywhere, because any game that gets made is its own miracle.

a lot of social media is falling the fuck apart, and i don't think it's novel to say it, but like… for scale, the original version of this blog post was written in late 2024, a couple days after cohost shut its doors. i think a lot about cohost these days, as someone who now has to maintain an active userbase and introduce features, as someone who has to manage communities, as someone who is doing this in the wake of tumblr timidly presenting its site-breaking reblogs change and then instantly hiding it the moment it got any pushback, like j cole hiding might delete later.

"the old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters." - famous swordfighter, utena tenjou.

i am 100% utena said that.