Neocities

MOOD: festive
LISTENING TO: Justice
WATCHING: longplays on YouTube
PLAYING: American Truck Simulator
EATING: random Christmas treats
DRINKING: Darjeeling tea First of all, a big thank you to everyone who commented under the Twitter thread for the previous journal entry! It was just a few people that gave feedback, but it still matters to me since making a blog like this has been something I've been wanting to do for a very long time, and now that it's off the ground I'm glad it's appreciated somewhat. This journal entry will be mainly focusing on random things relating to this website that have come up ever since I made the first "proper" journal entry on here. A few people have asked me about Neocities since me trying to get one off the ground has been a thing for the past few years, so this journal entry is largely aimed at them.

One of the biggest goals I had for this website, and currently the only feature that works on it, is for it to be a place for me to be able to post long-form blogs instead of being stuck with just Twitter-style microblogging. It's been good for that so far now that I've got everything set up, but one interesting thing is that whenever I think about this, one of the things I compare this idea to is just using Twitlonger instead. In the time since I posted the previous journal entry I tried getting on Twitlonger just to see how it's doing these days, and turns out it no longer exists! That was very surprising to me considering how much people were using it for long "tweets" back during the days before covid. My guess is that it had to shut down due to issues with Twitter now requiring money for API access ever since Elon Musk took over. It might also be some other reason, I didn't look too much into it.

Up until posting the previous journal entry, I've only tested this website and its theme on my PC where everything seemed to work fine. But now that it's up on da interwebz, I tried opening it on my Android phone, and lo and behold the fonts are messed up. To save space, I tried sticking to just Impact and Georgia for this site's fonts since those are supposed to be under the whole "core fonts for the web" thing which made me assume they'd come preinstalled with every browser, but apparently Android continues the GNU/Linux tradition of not coming with these fonts even though Google doesn't care much if something is free or nonfree, so if you open this website on an Android phone all the fonts will be messed up. I haven't yet decided how I want to fix this; I'll most likely change things so that the header that's using Impact will be replaced by some SVG logo, and the body text will use some custom-picked font I'll have to include with the website. I suppose this will be a good opportunity to look up what the modern best practices are for using custom fonts on websites; from what I've seen a lot of places are using fonts provided by Google somehow, so I'll need to look into that.

One other unfortunate thing I found out is that Neocities doesn't support Flash. Now, most of the web hasn't supported Flash for probably a decade at this point, so let me explain what I mean here. One of my other intentions with this website is to use it to host random files that I don't want to disappear from the web, and some of these files would have been Flash games. I've seen ways to make Flash game sites using some JavaScript library that would render the Flash files using HTML5 instead of having to use the now long abandoned Flash plugin, and that was one of the things I wanted to do here just so that there's at least one more place left where people can access at least some of their favorite Flash games without going through the trouble of installing Flashpoint or messing with one of the old Flash players or whatever. But after looking into it, it appears that Neocities simply doesn't allow hosting Flash files on their servers at all unless you pay up. So once I finally get around to adding those games to this website, I'll have to either figure out some way of hosting them for free elsewhere (maybe on Google Drive since that tends to be a popular choice for free file hosting these days), or pay up. We'll see what happens.

I'm still planning to write a retrospective of how 2025 went for me soon, so to the single digit number of people who actually read my posts on this website, please look forward to it! Linking my journal entries to Twitter threads so that people could comment on them seemed to work great, so I'll do the same with this post. Anyways, thanks for reading, and until next time!

Reply via Twitter Go back