looking ahead
This week's been a little stressful, but there's a lot to look forward to for the weekend. First of all, I decided to create this website. Earlier this week I was looking into different places where I could put my writing and just talk about anything I felt like. I found lots of different places, some of which were like newsleters where people could subscribe to your content so that every time you released something new it would go to their email. Other places were more for monetary reasons, with the purpose of getting a little extra cash for your writing. The first of these is the one that I looked into a bit, but I found it to be a bit... bland. There wasn't really any form of customization that you could do. It was pretty much just your writing and that's it. It felt too barren and restrictive for me, so I searched for something different. Not to mention that when you're first signing up, it tells you to give a topic that your newsletter would be about. It took me forever to get past that page, because I spent so much time trying to think of a few words that summed up my content. In the end though, I did all that thinking for nothing because within an hour of having my account I decided to delete it to try something else.
I have a little bit of experience with Wordpress, so I decided to take a look into that to see if it was more like what I was looking for. But I soon came to realize that not only was it as customizable as I would like it to be, but that it was incredibly confusing. It automatically makes entries for you, and it expects you to just have content for your site ready to go. It was incredibly too stressful for me, but as I was trying to figure out how to customize it, I got a pretty good idea of what I was looking for. But alas, Wordpress was also too restrictive for the type of content that I wanted to have. I haven't been able to delete my account with them yet, but I'll get to it eventually.
It was when I had stopped looking for a website that I could express myself in the way that I wanted that I found what I had been looking for all along. I was scrolling through tumblr and was just browsing through various blogs when in one blog's bio it said to check out their website. I clicked on it and was immidiately taken aback by the sheer amount of customization that their page had. Now, I've known about Neocities for a while, but I never really gave a thought to check it out until a few days ago when I realized the potential that it had, and the power that this website could give me. I think one of the reasons why I shied away from this website before is because I'm a novice at code. Up until a few days ago, I had only had minimal learning moments with html, and that was when I was customizing my page on Toyhouse. And even then, all I really did was insert my profile picture into the html and put my other info into the boxes that were already provided.
I wasn't very confident in my skills at first, and it took me a lot longer than it should've just to understand the very basics. At first, this was proving to be an issue because it was cutting into my time that I had for school. That's what I was afraid of when I was making my account at first, is that I would either, 1. get too frustrated trying to learn code and give up before I could get anything accomplished, or 2. become so obsessed with making this website look nice that I would neglect my school work. I want to say it was "luckily" the ladder, because I'm very happy with the way that my website has turned out so far, but I do think that I started falling a little bit behind in my school work. In between classes I would update the website... when class got slow I would check in on my website again... as soon as school was over I would start working on the coding for my website...etc etc, you get the point. Luckily my grades haven't been affected any, it's just that I was putting more stress on myself because I wasn't able to balance school and my website at the same time. Hopefully in the future when my site is fully functional, I won't have this issue anymore since there won't be much to do anyway.
But anyways, the week is over and the weekend is fast approaching. I'm looking forward to being able to be up at unreasonable hours working on getting the other pages of this site functional. And I'm also hoping that over the weekend, possibly tonight or tomorrow night, that I'll be able to finish the original Child's Play trilogy so that I can get my "movies" tab up and running and have some actual content in there. I mean, I have plenty of movies that I want to talk about already, but I think it's better when all my ideas are still fresh in my mind. That way it's my most authentic reaction and review, yanno? Anyway, I'm excited about this whole learning experience and I hope that it proves to be a worthwile joy in my life.
