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The Manifesto of msx.gay

A page describing my thoughts on the modern internet, how I made my own space on the web, and why I like having control.

Part 2: The History of This Page

Back in 2018, I was told about HTML. I decided to look for resources, and W3Schools was the first to pop up. I learned the bare-necessity tags like <p> and <img>, clobbered together a webpage, found a webhost, and published my first ever hand-written webpage. I had been playing around with Weebly in the years before, but this was the first webpage I had ever written 100% from scratch. Naturally, since it was my first website, it looked like absolute garbage.

A screenshot of my webpage from November 2018. The background is a red/white dithered pattern, text is black and center-aligned, and a cat image is in the center.

If a tag wasn't absolutely necessary to render the page, it wasn't included. I omitted the <!DOCTYPE> tag, the <html> tag, the </body> tag, and all </p> tags. Of course, I was just starting out with HTML, so it's fair to say I would get better over the years.

My next massive page update was definitely better looking. I had figured out CSS a bit, and made a page I was proud of.

A scrrenshot of my webpage from October 2019. The background is a dark blue, the header is in a dark green container, a paragraph element has a dark gold background with a light gold border on the left, and an image with a caption is on a dark cyan element with a light cyan border on the left.

Compared to my previous page, this one was a lot better. While the header font choice definitely wasn't great, this page was one I liked. I'd figured out how to use meta tags, I figured out how to indent, and I figured out how to use HTML comments. Overall, it's definitely a better page.

At this point, 2020 happened. Thanks to the COVID lockdowns, I had a lot of spare time on my hands. Naturally, I used this to play around with HTML. During the summer, I discovered a service called Neocities. While I was too young to have remembered GeoCities, I found the idea of Neocities to be interesting. On August 1st, 2020, I made a Neocities account. At this time, I still had my GitHub Pages website, so this was meant to be experimental. I made a webpage using Seamonkey Composer on an EeePC 1011PC running Windows XP, and published it from that netbook. The layout was incredibly basic, consisting of a header image, two images of my cats, some 88x31 buttons, and some text. However, this basic layout would live on well into the future.

A screenshot of my webpage from around August 2020. The page has a black background, center-aligned white text, and two cat images shown side-by-side.

Within a couple of months, I decided to migrate to Neocities and abandon my GitHub Pages site. Most of the changes over the years consisted of cosmetic updates. A tile background was added within a couple months, the page source code would be re-written to make bulk edits easier, and some more pages were added. Within the past year, some larger updates happened. My page was put in a container, letting me have secondary backgrounds that could change varying with the seasons. The photography page was redone with pages for individual cameras, a page with radio resources would be added, and a webcam was set up in a spot where my cats chill.

Comparing my first page to my current page, it's a night and day difference. My current page is much more organized, and laid out in a way that looks nice. Instead of the photography page being a folder listing, it's a proper page with thumbnails. I have a much more descriptive front page, pride buttons that have been used by other pages, and a cat webcam that gives you a reason to come back. My website is definitely better now than it was in the past, and in the future, I only see it getting better.

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Made in 2023 by MarshmelloSUCKS using SeaMonkey Composer
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