If you're here - hi! This was a bit of a surprise project that I needed to very quickly design and execute. My previous site was hosted on carrd, and while I love and respect just how affordable carrd is ($20 for a year of hosting up to 10 pages with a pretty powerful and intuitive editor isn't that bad!), I was only really using one page and it seemed like a bit much for my use case.
I paid the $20 on January 13th 2025 - the deadline approaches, and the card that I had linked to carrd (confusing, I know) had ceased to exist. I either needed to link a new card to keep paying, or take the secret second option:
Prior to starting work on this site I didn't actually have all that much experience with HTML/CSS. I'd messed with HTML a little around a decade ago, but that was about it; I'd never touched CSS and I've barely touched JS. That's why there's no JS in this site btw - because I didn't have time to learn how to make it work. I started work on this about a week before the deadline, and just needed the core design and page content to be in place so I can go back and tweak it later if I need to.
I went back and forth on how to implement a lot of the site's design. Instead of border images I originally used background images that I had manually sliced into sides and separated out and was applying them with the appropriate tiling. When I learned I could just use border images, I felt pretty stupid(cat.uk). There were a lot of issues like this where I designed something one way, only to later realise that CSS already had a solution to the problem built in and I wasted countless hours on stuff like this. I also fucking hate CSS and wish for it to burn in Mount Doom.
Okay, well that's an exaggeration. I had a lot of fun writing CSS and figuring out novel ways to optimise my image usage throughout this project (the graphical assets take up less than 1kb!) - what I didn't enjoy was trying to make it also work on mobile. Truth be told, the site actually doesn't function correctly on mobile right now. The text in the nav buttons and clock on mobile are aligned to the top of their boxes, instead of the center. Why? I have no fucking clue and do not want to spend even more time than I already have trying to figure it out.
If you take a look at any of the HTML/CSS and it looks like a mess, here's a surprise for you: I wrote this whole thing in Notepad. Should I have used literally anything else? Absolutely. I chose not to for one simple reason - it makes for a funny thing to put in this readme and will make anyone with experience wince.
Anyway, there's a lot more I could write here but I'm hungry and want to go play a video game before tomorrow (the 13th) hits. It's not going to be a complicated day, but I'm planning on changing my email provider from Proton because Proton is kinda a shitty company so I need to transfer my emails and domain over.
That's it for me. See ya.