From Write.as to Neocities
At the moment I'm looking at how to make my own website, and where to put it. I was using write.as and while I love the site's ethos of automatic integration with the fediverse, I don't think I'm going to keep using it. It doesn't offer the complete flexibility that I'm looking for, and I think $9.00 a month is steep for what it actually offers.
Eventually I want to get to the point where I host my own site somewhere and I have complete control over the what, where, how etc. Right now I'm not really in a position to set that up, but I still want a place on the web to call my own and offers more flexibility than write.as, so I'm going to use neocities.
I think neocities is exactly the place I need to be while I figure out HTML and CSS. I learned some HTML about fifteen years ago, so I could do with a refresher. I used CSS a little bit in a previous job, bashing a clunky old WordPress site around. Either way, I'm not super familiar with either, so I feel like neocities is a really good playground to get started.
Here's a couple of things that I'm planning, or want to get to grips with:
Markdown to HTML for posting
I like writing in Obsidian, and in Markdown in general. I've always been kinda sceptical of the utility of Markdown; initially it seemed like just a different way of doing things than using a text processer with a GUI.[^1] Some of the things that allow you to structure your text are crucial to me now, however. Every time that I have to click a particular style to add a heading in Word instead of just typing a number of hashes, it drives me up the wall. To that end, I'm obviously going to be writing blog posts in Obsidian, and therefore Markdown, and it would be easiest if I could just drop that Markdown into a Posts folder on neocities and have it wrapped in CSS and availble on the site. I straight up don't know if that's possible, though. I could use Pandoc to convert the Markdown file to HTML without much fuss, but I'd like to avoid the extra step, if I could. This is one of the first things that I want to figure out.
Collections and resources
I'm a horrible gremlin, really. I can't help but keep things, squirrelling them away for later, and that includes a bunch of links to things that I think are useful. Most of them are lost in the infinite realms of digital storage - to the point where I'm not even sure what I've got, these days. I reckon if I stick them on the site somewhere, though, they'll be useful to other people, too, and more visible, so I'll be able to make better use of them. I also want to make collections, so that when someone asks for something like podcast recommendations, I can point them to a little collection that shows what I listen to regularly, and why.
Site layout
I have no idea on this one, yet. I know I want to set it so that the font for everything is Atkinson Hyperlegible[^2], but that's as far as I've got. I think I'm going to keep it fairly minimal - make the stuff that I'm putting on here the focus, rather than the way that they're presented. I know that's not necessarily the neocities way, evoking the extreme flashy pixels vibe of Geocities as it does, but "eh, it's my site", which I think is actually the vibe its going for more.
Footnotes
Functioning footnotes would be big deal for me; I'm an incurable footnotes user. I think there's almost need to use them for references when writing on the web - most of the things that you can reference can be hyperlinked - but I can't help but think in parentheticals, so footnotes containing little diversionary thoughts that don't fit in the actual flow of text are a godsend.
Tags
I don't know if it's possible to create hashtags using HTML and CSS, but along with folder hierarchy it's the primary way that I organise documents.[^3] Everything that I write in Obsidian gets tagged, so that I can slice and dice notes by combining tags that I need. I might combine 'Design' with 'TTRPG' so that it gives me all the game design thinking about TTRPGs instead of all the notes on design, or those on game design more broadly.
I can't imagine that it's easy to do that kind of tagging with just HTML and CSS - would it require a little bank of links that linked to a tag page that had all the other pages with those tags linked? Would I have to manually link all those pages together? Sounds like a pain in the ass. As much as putting together your own site is fun, and really is, I don't want it to become this arduous process. In reality, the harder it is for me to get anything done on the site, the less likely I am to keep it up.
I think that's probably more than enough to be getting on with, for now, anyway. I'll report back soon.
[1]: Alternatively, claims about being easier and faster to write - how is CTRL + I vs SHIFT + 8 really any different? Esp. when you consider that most markdown editors just apply two asterisks when you hit CTRL + I anyway.
[2]: It's my favourite. I've set it as the Obsidian default font, too. I spend a lot of time reading or writing on the computer, and it's definitely the most readable font that I've found. I haven't got any vision issues, and so I can't testify as to how good it is if you do have any vision problems, but I love it anyway.
[3]: And snippets of documents, actually. I usually write everything in my daily note in Obsidian and divide different sections of composition with horizontal lines and tags. That way everything is linked to a specific place in time, and sorted by topic. For bigger compositions, they have their own folders, obviously, and I just link them to my daily note when I've been working on them instead.