big day for will

Today I made myself finish up this blog. I had a barebones layout made in 11ty, the static site generator that I'm using with nunjucks layout files.

It wasn't bad at all given my prior brief stints into very basic html/css. I've always loved the aesthetics of old web1.0 websites and the idea of personal blogs. I have a blast scrolling through some of the top pages on neocities or just clicking through peoples' keyrings going from page to page.

I wanted to make this blog as a way for me to do a couple of things:

1. I need to get in the habit of tailoring my learning to what I want.
2. I like the idea of having a personal website with the state of social media (looking at X, the everything app).
3. I want some kind of creative outlet for myself (even if it's just stream of consciousness blog posts).

I really haven't enjoyed programming in the way I thought I would when starting school. It's partially because I don't think I enjoy it the way some people do, like I don't have that innate passion. But, partially because of my curriculum at school; we don't learn too much interesting stuff.

I don't look at social media much either anymore, at least not as much as I used to. My phone is void of all of it except Bluesky, Instagram (for school friends and family), and Reddit (to scroll for deals and troubleshooting, duh). So I'm kind of just hopping on the personal website bandwagon for fun.

Writing has always been one of the more accessible options for a creative outlet, as it has the lowest barrier to entry in terms of obvious skill differences between beginners and professionals. Words are words on a screen or page, it's not immediate garbage like any visual or aural art I've tried to make. It's a lot less frustrating and requires so much less patience with myself.

Also, this showed me how stupid I can be and keep beating my head into a wall till something works. It took me so much longer than I'd like to admit to get this website deployed using github pages. They've changed it to be mainly through "GitHub Actions" now, since I've last used it. Instead of just reading up on how these work and what that means for deploying a website with a static site generator, I just kept searching for templates. They would work on their own, but the second my little grubby fingers touched anything it would break. It was mainly me trying to make too many changes at a time to address all of the issues at once, so maybe that's a good learning lesson to take away from this first attempt at a website.

(P.S. github pages with a static site generator really is not that hard, like at all, i just had to read for about 2 seconds to realize everything i was doing wrong)