A fresh coat of paint

Update 2: I figured out how to port my code into Hugo and basically have the best of both worlds now, which is pretty sick!

Update 1: Using a pre-made theme, as convenient as it may be, kinda takes the fun out of doing this for me, so I decided to ditch it and write my own code with the help of helpful folks across the internet. So even though I have to hardcode everything now, I actually really enjoy how this whole thing turned out.

It’s been a while, huh. I kept telling myself this website ought to represent something fruitful, that I was going to actively push myself to post things on it, yadda yadda… Let it be known that reliable is waaay down on the list of words people would use to describe me, if it’s even on the damn list at all.

I’ve been struggling a lot with creative activities for a little while now and there’s no one to blame but my brain and the state of, well, everything. It feels impossible to string my thoughts together and come up with something legible and it’s so fucking frustrating.

The reason why I’m writing this, though, is because I completely rebuilt this whole thing from the ground up. When I first got into Neocities, the mere thought of having to deal with HTML and whatnot seemed extremely daunting and to an extent it still is. I’m not that great at the stuff, which is why I gravitated towards tools like Zonelets (and posteriorly, Zoner), the idea of being able to build a website with so little effort blowing my little mind.

But with unreliability comes a deep-seated inquietude and so of course I had to switch things up a bit. And there’s where Hugo comes in.

Surprisingly, it was not at all difficult to get everything going. It’s not too dissimilar from the previous tools I mentioned, both of them also being static site generators, and once you get the fundamentals down everything flows with ease. I also figured out how to use Neocities' CLI tool, which is insanely easy to set up and I have no idea why I didn’t start using it sooner.

There’s still some things to set up, namely visual assets and a little CSS customization to get this website looking like it actually belongs to me, but so far I’m quite happy with how it looks. Here’s to hoping this ignites a spark in my brain that gives me a sudden jolt of prolificness and inspiration.