ENTRY 04-07-25: First ever blog!

8:38am - 04/07/2025 | CONTAINS: My (painful) experience in coding, a little profanity

Hii!!! This is my first ever blog and I don't know how to write a proper blog or even start the blog so I'm going to briefly introduce myself: I’m dancingPatches, and I'm the webmaster of this Madness world! I go by it/they mostly but any pronouns are fine too! There's an about page for you to know more about me! I think it's nice to start the first blog off with some website information like my process in coding along with some history stuff about my website!...
In 2020 during lockdown, I was browsing around the internet, looking for prompt generators to draw… stuff and I stumbled upon a heaven for website: Neocities. I saw a lot like a whoolleeee lot of generators there and I knew the existence of Neocities since then. It was a shame that I wasn't interested in website development and instead I was interested in bitching on Discord with some fuckass strangers that ruined my damn life (I hate them as you can tell). Only in late 2024 that I wanted to make my own website after I got into Homestuck and I saw some personal websites on Neocities like Twelvemen, Cloudcover, etc. I always wanted a place to decorate and express myself, but social media just kinda leaned onto change pfp, write limited bio and.. that's it. So the idea of making my own website is awesome to me and I started to learn HTML and CSS since then.
The process of learning is just me learning the basics of HTML and I think it was pretty easy to get the hang of! I learnt HTML from a guy on YouTube (who was Vietnamese) and I practiced with Visual Studio Code. CSS was harder than HTML at first but then it got easier to remember than HTML! After learning the basics from YouTube, I then go on freeCodeCamp to learn basic website development. After learning the basics of HTML and CSS, I got kinda…bored and uninterested which I definitely didn't want to. I browsed through websites to find inspiration and motivation to create my website but no use (plus I got distracted with making my first animation meme).
In early 2025, I picked up HTML and CSS again and learned from the start. It was easy so I glossed through it. And then all of the sudden, I just threw all of it out of the window and jumped straight into making my own website. I felt so proud cuz I actually made it with my own two hands and actually finished it! But since I had no experience in coding nor basic web design, the first website design was… it was something. I based the layout on my straw.page so it looked…not really a typical website if you get what I mean. Everything looked broken when on other displays (cuz I used absolute position for everything) and everything was so big and had so much empty space and since the elements were so big, the page felt so small and cluttered. The navigation spinning smiley face I made was an interesting idea I had but since it was in absolute position, it disappeared on other displays, making it inaccessible to others. Plus, the navigation was blending in with the background making people don't know where the navigation at, even though it was spinning. After a while, I decided to redo the website again (because mostly it kinda ugly and didnt look like a website but rather than a carrd or straw.page). And here we are with my new website look! There's a lot to improve but I'm currently loving it!
Below is the image of my old website look!
Most of the artworks that are used on this website are made by me of course! Otherwise are credited in the DIRECTORY And it's kind of a nightmare to make the art elements for this website update. Since I'm away from my home (at the time I'm writing this), I can't access to a 1920x1080 display so I use a responsive test website to test out if my website look good when I'm on a laptop. I don't have access to my dear tablet so I have to reuse everything I had and it isn't much! (I couldn't make a lot of art this year cuz I'm too busy!) And I have to stay here for a month so gahhh!!!!! I also use traditional art and then scan and edit it in ibisPaintX to use in my website. It is so frustrating!!! But at least there isn't much art to use in this website and I got it done though! When I get back home, I'm going to remake one of my ads and make new art!
That about sums it up for this first entry of the website! Thank you for reading my horrible first blog, I’ll try to improve in the next entry!! See you in the next entry!! Read more