my relationship with my website has felt strained lately. i'm embarrasssed to admit that i've been having trouble dealing with the amount of attention it's gotten. i love working on my site and i don't plan to stop, but i still find myself craving another outlet. something that's lower pressure, with no expectations of style. less public performance and more personal utility. last week, i started writing my thoughts into obsidian and generating a site from them with quartz, and i'm pretty happy with the result. it feels good to make something from just my words.

you can find my drafts, lists, and whatever else at notes.ribo.zone.

i had too much fun with CSS for you to read this one from your feed reader, so visit my site!

happy new year!

i've returned to a more relaxed pace after the frenzy of weird web october, but i still have a few updates to report for the month.

first, a task that's been on my to-do list forever: compression and reorganization. i converted some fonts from .ttf to .woff2 and some images from .jpg to .png, dithered the few that were undithered, then compressed every image on the site with pinga. i also consolidated a handful of separate image folders into one big folder. changing file types and locations meant i had to go through and update the file paths on just about each page, but that's the sort of routine and simple work that i find very relaxing. the results are satisfying too; the total size of the site went from 176 MB to 110 MB!

next, games! i made a new page about virtual worlds, the online games i've played (and often loved). right now, it's made up of short sections about a few mmorpgs and virtual pet sites, but maybe one day all the games i love most will have their own pages. one already does! in march of 2023, i made a page for my final fantasy xiv character, intending it to be an alternative to the official lodestone page. my first javascript project ever used xivapi to display my character's job levels on the page, so they would always be up to date... but then the lodestone endpoints stopped working... and the page was totally blank for almost a year...... until now! i remade the page from scratch: no javascript, no fussing with job levels, just having fun with game screenshots and the official fankit. i can't seem to get the tooltips to work, but that's a problem for another day.

my second and final new page of the month is state songs, a project i started in february of this year and have made basically no progress on since. inspired by the album of the same name by john linnell, i want to put together a playlist of 50 songs, one for each state. the idea for the layout came to me right away: an svg map of the united states where clicking on any state will bring up the corresponding song. no problem! ...but what about the songs? i only got to 12/50 before abandoning the page in my WIP folder, untouched for many months. so, instead of waiting the project to somehow complete itself, i've released the draft with a comment section so i can get some help finding and remembering state songs.

participating in weird web october was really fun and rewarding. it was my first time doing a daily creative challenge, and now i think i understand the appeal. i went into it planning to only make a page or two, but then i got caught in some creative vortex and ended up with pages for 25 out of the 31 themes. instead of the pace¹ feeling stressful, it was liberatory. there was no time to fuss with tiny details for weeks or months. there was no time to convince myself out of an idea, either. i took weird as permission to not explain myself. no time to worry about making sense!

as a result, i felt free to experiment. some days i played with css tricks,² and others i shared an opinion or a little detail about my life. my submissions were all over the place, but i'm happy i shared them, even the ones i wasn't sure about.

but that's enough about me — this was a community event!

weird web october is what finally got me in the habit of checking my RSS feed reader, because it used octothorpes, a new protocol for hashtags across websites. while i don't understand how it works,³ it was really simple to use. by including a few <link> tags on my pages, they got listed on the #weirdweboctober page. what really sold me on octothorpes is that each tag also has an RSS feed, so i was able to see new weird webpages pop up in my feed reader every day. i loved it, so i hope octothorpes catch on as a tool for discovery and community on the open web.

i saw so many weird, fun, and inspiring sites last month. here are some favorites:

day one: nature by xixxii

this page took my breath away the first time i saw it. i don't want to say too much, so just know that it captures a sentiment i feel very deeply.

pigment explorer by vidya giri

yes!!! color is so interesting. i can wrap my head around how RGB color works but the world of pigments confuses and amazes me. i love to see chemical structures.

grand road buzz by mustafa enes

i will cherish the memory of playing this with my boyfriend and his brother, our laughter mixed with the game's sound effects. the sound is essential.

sciencizify by marie malarme

i love to look at small things. :)

what do our computers tell each other anyway? by ragman

this is a really clear and approachable explanation of the information shared when you visit a webpage. a useful resource to share.

the first GIFilm by yooksel

holy shit!!! absolutely delightful.

cow tools by sweetfish

i can't believe i made a whole page about being tired of memes, then mere hours later was proven wrong. i love cow tools. i could never get tired of cow tools.

stop killing spotted lanternflies! by ragman

another informative one — it's great news that they aren't damaging native trees! i hope people can learn to coexist with them.

bugs by sweetfish

so lovely. i can almost feel the sun and smell the grass.

day twenty-two: bugs by xixxii

another lovely scene. it reminds me that we can be pollinators too, spreading pollen from one flower to another with our fingers.

website scavenger hunt by sweetfish

recommended activity for anyone interested in personal websites. i think it would be especially valuable for those who are new to this, but even if you've been at it for a while, this could encourage you to explore in a new way. i love it.

keep making the web weird! see you next year!

1. context: in the two years i've spent working on this site, i've made about 40 pages. making 25 pages in a single month was unthinkable to me a few weeks ago.
2. `div:has(input:checked) + ul { display: block; }` was basically reinventing <details>, but i'm so pleased that it worked!
3. backend web development is still mostly a mystery to me. i'll figure it out eventually.

This month's new page is the neighborhood, a tribute to my favorite personal websites. I'm nowhere near finished with it, as I have many favorites.

The layout is my answer to two questions I've been mulling over for a while:

1. What would a responsive ASCII art scene look like?
2. How do I add more context to my button wall, without putting the buttons in a boring table?

For the first part, I knew the text art would have to be modular. Each piece could be no wider than a phone screen, and they'd all need to make sense both when placed side by side and when stacked on top of each other. I didn't really have a clear vision of what the modules would actually be, until I merged the idea with the second question. What if I took the homepage metaphor literally, and each button was placed in its own text art home, displayed in a little text art neighborhood?

The initial draft had signs next to each house with corresponding site URL. The signs would have been easy to update, but they looked too much like "for sale" signs and made the resulting neighborhood look abandoned. Horrible vibes all around. To give the page life, each house needed unique text art representing the site it linked to. So far, I've included some things you'd find in a neighborhood (a church, a power line) and some you might not (a ship, a ghost, a hog). This slows me down when adding new sites, but it's much more rewarding.

Of course, right after putting the page online, I noticed another issue. It looked too much like suburban sprawl! Offline, moving from a suburb to a walkable neighborhood changed my life significantly for the better, yet here I was making an recreation of suburban development on my website. Horrible vibes, again! This neighborhood needed a train. It needed bus stops. The obvious analogy for a bus line is a webring, but I hadn't joined any webrings. They're often broken and hard to navigate, and, if I can be honest here, I've avoided joining webrings because I don't like the idea of having a link on my site that I have no control over. What if the person who joins after you has a site that you don't like very much? But then, isn't that the same sort of logic that keeps people driving cars instead of taking the bus? I needed to get over it, so, finally, I've joined some webrings. I'm giving up a little control so my site can be a better part of the community.

You may argue that I'm taking the metaphor too literally, but I disagree. I think I can push it a little further. If each homepage is a single family home, what would multifamily housing look like? (Maybe public access unix systems?) What is the personal web equivalent of a grocery store? How do you add a bike lane?

P.S. Today is this site's second birthday! For a limited time, you can sign the birthday card. (It's like a guestbook, but on a special page.)

Yesterday was the final Queer/Trans Zinefest in Providence. I've attended the past two years, and each time I've left with a rush of creative inspiration and an armful of zines, prints, and other ephemera. It's an event that means a lot to me, and I'm sad that it's over. But that's just the way of things; everything ends. As I write, summer is ending too. The message displayed on the LED matrix signs above the highways in Rhode Island is stuck in my mind:

Slow down
and savor the
end of summer

Since my last update, the "sunday" section of my site (where I put the pages I've made for community events) has grown the most, and it houses a lot of the work I'm most happy with. I have a lot of fun working from prompts, and having a community to share pages with keeps me motivated. (Deadlines help too.) June was a big one; I participated in three jams!

• 32-Bit Cafe Code Jam (theme: destination vacation) -> Fishing minigame world tour
• Indieweb Carnival (theme: DIY) -> Making and mending
• Glitch Code Jam (theme: rainbow) -> Eight stripes

In July, I made my first video game. I had a free weekend, so I started messing around in bitsy, a tiny and beginner-friendly game engine. I recommend it! From Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning (with a healthy amount of sleep in the middle), I worked out some of the ideas that rattle around in my head all the time. The result is a 5-7 minute adventure game called Eukaryote Story; you can play it on my site or itch.io. I would love for you to check it out and let me know what you think. I would also love to make more games! There's a bitsy jam happening right now, so I'm brainstorming... We'll see.

In August, I was in the mood to make 88x31 buttons, so my free graphics page is finally starting to take shape. I'm still in that mood, so I'm happy to take requests if you've got 'em. Recreating logos at a tiny, crunchy scale is especially fun to me, but I'm open to other ideas.

My site turns two at the end of this month, but I won't make any promises to do something extravagant to celebrate. Instead, I think I'll just slow down and savor the end of summer.

In two days, it will have been ten months since I created this site! Wauw. To celebrate, here's the first real entry in my shiny new RSS feed. All written by hand and—

"Wait, how is this different than the changelog?"
I update the changelog every time I make an update to the site, no matter how minor, and those entries are typically as brief as possible. I don't think it's neccessary to broadcast all of those changes, so I won't. This feed will be less frequent, focus on major site updates, and feature more detailed commentary from me.

"Erm, why not just put this stuff in your blog?"
While I'd like my blog to cover a wide range of topics, what I really don't want to do is clog it up with site meta. I'm not particularly interested in building a website about building a website, y'know? Site news, plans, and the motivations behind them (sometimes! no guarantees) will stay confined to this feed, so the blog can be full of whatever else.

Unil now, only neocities users could opt in to recieving site updates from me, and while I love the community here and I'm really grateful for all of the feedback I've received so far, I'm also interested in connecting with people and sites outside of the neocities ecosystem. With an RSS feed, anyone with an RSS reader can get updates if they want to. If you're one such person, hello!

I'm proud of what I've put together these past ten months, and I'm planning to write up a restrospective of my first year of webmastery for the site's first birthday. Thanks for looking and reading and scrolling and clicking. Bye!