WebDev-Log, or Something.

Upload date: 06/26/2026

Hey. How's it going? I'm doing well. I've just been goin' through college, occasionally drawing shit, and working on new stuff for this site. This blogpost is just gonna be about the last thing, though. Think of this post as a "webdev-log", or something like that.

Git My Beloved

But before that, let's talk about Git. I've been using Git to deploy new changes made to this site without having to tediously upload each individual file into the site editor that's in Neocities. Maybe you could batch upload files to the site through the editor, but I never really bothered to try. I also know that you could use WebDAV to mount your site as a drive on your computer, but that requires a supporter account, so, no dice. That's where Git comes in. Using git, and while following this tutorial, I uploaded my site as a Github repository (repo for short), then did some stuff to deploy every new change made in the repository to Neocities. If anyone else wants to do the same shit and hasn't already looked into this process, check it out! Not only is deploying through Git REALLY FUCKING CONVENIENT, using Git's version control features is really helpful, too. Another neat feature of Git is branches. Basically, it's a separate version of your Git repo that you can work on alongside your "main branch." I took advantage of this and made an entire branch just dedicated on making "experimental" changes that I want to see be made, but won't implement it to my main branch until I know for sure that it's ready. So let's get into that branch, shall we?

Experimental Branch

So, I was considering making some changes to the homepage, because at the moment, I find it very lackluster. I figured it could benefit with some more "stuff" in it, and could benefit with some beautification. The two YouTube embeds that are on the homepage look very out of place right next to the "latest blog" thing that's on the bottom of the homepage. I also don't upload much videos on YT that much so don't see much of a point of having two YouTube embeds as the first big things on the site. I want the two most important things to be shown on this site is my art, and my inane ramblings disguised as a "blog post." Who knows? Maybe once I upload YouTube more often, I'll put more emphasis on YouTube part. I procrastinate more on video creation more than I'd like to admit, which is weird, because that used to be the thing I wanted to do the most back then, but I digress.

So, to put a larger emphasis on my other creative hobby-related shit on my homepage, I initially decided on this.

I had a div on my page that had 3 hyperlinks laid vertically alongside an image and some text, those three hyperlinks leading to my art, my graphic design shit, and my photos. The idea is that they're supposed to change every time I uploaded a new thing, and it's all there for everyone to see the moment they see my page.

I then thought to myself, "What if I laid out the hyperlinks horizontally and had the text be placed OVER the images instead of right alongside them?" I don't really know the exact thought process, other than I knew that it would've shown more of the art, especially if I removed the unnecessary padding and margin.

It was really easy to implement it, surprisingly enough. I just had to reuse some code I took from ribo.zone, and edit it to fit my vision of what the element should look like.

I then realized something, "Fuck, wouldn't this make the gallery page COMPLETELY WORTHLESS?" I basically have links to all 3 parts of my gallery, when the first page of the gallery is supposed to be the only page to have that. In short, it would be redundant. So, instead, I moved that all of what I worked on to the gallery page.

I think it looks pretty neat! Way better than how the page looked originally.

This still left me with the homepage to work on, though, but I came up with something slightly different. What if instead of showing 3 hyperlinks, it showed only 1 hyperlink? It'll still change whenever I upload some new art, graphic, or photo, but it's only ONE image. Thus, kinda alleviating the redundancy issue. So I implemented it to the site, and it looks sick! I'm really fuckin' with what I've done so far!

Notice how there's placeholder images in place of what should be new art 'n shit. I used placehold.co for a lot of these placeholders, and I think they're an invaluable resource. A part of me wants to have a dedicated "resource page" for all of the shit I used in this server, but I also want to just leave it to the indieweb vets who have way more ball knowledge than I do.

To give you a bigger picture on what these changes can look like, here's a bigger screenshot.

So Why am I Not Seeing These Changes???

So you may be asking, "why not deploy these changes now, CJ?!" In short, I don't have much to show for in terms of art, at least in terms of what I made recently, I could dump most of my old shit into this site, but, I dunno, I wanna show off new shit that I've made. I think I'm just being insecure, again. That lack of new material is keeping me from fully deploying these experimental changes to Neocities. But, despite that, I still wanna show them off, not only because I just wanted an excuse to update this blog because it feels weird only uploading a single blogpost per month, I'm also very proud of what I've been working on so far, and I want to show them off.

Until then, and until I do make these sick new changes, I'll see you til I make a new blog post and disappear for the rest of the month. Seeya!