Why a Website?

I thought it would be fun. I just had the idea one day "What if I put my thesis on Neocities?" I tried making a Neocities website ages ago, but the website tutorial only goes so far and I wasn't that committed to learning it on my own. When it popped back into my brain several months later I had a renewed interest in it. I wanted to learn a new thing, something challenging. Coding seems intimidating but I wanted to see if that was really true. I also wanted to be able say that I learned it on a whim just because. And now I can! (although I'm farrrr from an expert)

I did the HTML course on FreeCodeCamp and a bit of the CSS one. I stopped partway through, partially because they're not as helpful as I wanted, but mostly because I wanted to just try stuff out for myself. FreeCodeCamp teaches you to code by giving you a project like making a cafe menu, and walking you through the steps. I enjoyed that part, I didn't want to learn by memorizing elements or whatever, but some things weren't to my liking.

The most annoying part was sometimes it would show me a way of doing something and but in the next step reveal that was the more inefficient way and "Here's a better way instead!" but then I'd end up remembering the slower way better since it was shown to me first. I would've liked it the other way around so I could still understand how the language has grown, but not be stuck with the old way in my head. There's also no hints, which was very challenging. There's a hint button, but when you click it it basically says "Think harder or Google it".

It was a helpful enough start though, I felt fairly confident to start building this when I did. I used a template for the sake of timing and aesthetics, but I still wanted to understand all of the code. I also made sure it was one made by an actual person and shared from a website they made themselves. You can find the one I used here! I had fun searching for templates, it was cool seeing this community, both now and during the freecodecamp course, that seemed so excited for new people to learn. Almost every question I asked had an answer and a readily available solution with steps.

The first thing I changed after copying the code in was the corners of the little tab on the left with the links, and I was so excited when I figured out how to round them. It's one of my favorite parts of this, wanting to change something about the website, finding how, and getting it exactly how I want. Another part I'm really proud of is having multiple pages that all have the same theme and are all linked to one another.

There's several ideas I had for this project at the start that I had to reel in because they ended up being too complicated or would take too long. At the verrry start when I made my Neocities account, I did the tutorial in hopes of having a cute little blog, but gave up because it all seemed too complicated and like it would take too long. Now I've dipped my toes in more, it seems a bit less big and complicated, but I'm still ready to drop it for a while. I never meant for coding to become a big part of my life, it's truly a whim. I might return to make my cute little blog someday, maybe not.

For parts of my research I felt different in that way while learning. There are a lot of videos to the effect of "How to learn all of coding in 30 minutes and become the CEO of IBM by Thursday!!!" or whatever. Whereas I'm not here for a career, I'm just here for a nice little website. Maybe that's where part of the enthusiasm for new people to learn comes from, wanting to get rich off of people wanting to get rich. But there were also many tips, tricks, and tutorials from people genuinely just wanting to share and excited to help, and that's been my favorite part of this. I highly recommend just browsing Neocities for a bit, it's truly incredible what people can come up with.