Scrapped my site and built it from scratch, which turned out to be a very pleasant experience. The first iteration of this site was built off Zonelets with basically no html/css/javascript experience, and the hands-on approach of fucking around with it until it resembled what I wanted was illuminating.
However, the more I learned as to how I could be doing things better/more efficiently and laying a better foundation for myself the more I realized the site was sloppy and not really primed for growth. Not the corporate kind of growth, but the creative kind. Like a tree or something? Allegories aren’t my forte. What really occured to me as being more important than that, however, was the whole idea of this site being, well, mine. Zonelets is a great template and I’m not bashing it at all, but what I wanted out of this site is something that I can really call my own. That’s what this whole return to the personal web is about, right? Sure, I tried some static site generators too, but it was further from what I wanted to do, with their own schema and paradigms to learn. What I wanted was just to write my own html/css/javascript, the only thing I wanted automated was the blogging experience: mainly having automatic pagination and having the page load posts automatically, as opposed to me manually putting in a call for each post whenever I write something new, or, god forbid, posting the actual contents of my posts all into one html file. Javascript wasn’t actually as difficult as I thought it would be, it reminded me a little bit of Rust, which I’m not experienced with either but I’ve been learning as of late. I think I’ll package up the script and related html/css as a free template for people who want a feed-style blog to use. Mind you, it’s not entirely where I want it yet - I want to have longer posts truncated with an option to view the full post in a new tab, and to automate the process of updating the blog. Right now it goes as follows: run python script to generate array of posts in posts folder, minus ones prefixed with draft_ → copy and paste that result into the beginning of the javascript → upload the updated script and new post to Neocities via the site editor. This isn’t a big deal, and is relatively efficient compared to what I originally had going when I started remaking this site. However, it could be automated to be done with one click: run bash script → bash script runs python script and writes result to the beginning of a copy of the javascript → bash script uses Neocities API to upload updated script and new post.