💾 Archived View for spiritualinstinct.site › log › 2024-03-01.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 14:57:44. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Also commonly known as CSS. In my last year in college, I took a course on web development. We learned about creating basic web pages in HTML and performing basic programming tasks in PHP, Javascript and SQL. CSS wasn't part of the course, but it was fun to make everything look a bit nicer with a different font and background color. It all seemed so easy.
After I graduated college, I decided to have a domain name registered (not the same one as this capsule), since domain names are super cheap. Got some web hosting service for a relatively low price, and started hacking a website together from StackOverflow pages, as one usually does. I copied most of the layout from a friend's website, including the framework and some neat JS tricks. Around this time, I became aware of how complicated CSS could be, and where the infamous "how do I center this div?" joke came from. I dunno Greg, how DO you center a div? CSS is unfortunately nearly impossible to debug, the only way to get what you want is to simply try things out. Display: Block? No? How about inline? Flex? Or how about Position: Absolute? Should I add this to the parent div instead?
A few headaches later, after I had changed the background colors and fonts to my liking and had added a few neat tricks of my own (like having > and < arrows appear around a button when hovering the mouse over it), I hit something that I feel must be similar to a writer's block or art block. The website was somewhat finished, although nearly empty from the lack of personal data (I'd rather not share things about myself online out of privacy reasons, even on a website no one will ever visit), blog posts or projects. I figured it might be because the sleek, modern Bootstrap framework layout didn't quite match the retrowave-ish theme I had in mind, complete with movie poster fonts as page titles, bright colors on dark background and CRT lines. After all, I learned basic website development, not web design.
A short while ago, I stumbled upon a website that looked somewhat old-fashioned, but had a layout that matched much better with the retro-computing aesthetic the creator had used. I spend last sunday completely overhauling my website, throwing out the framework, changing the fonts and the colors and the things, and shamelessy copying the layout from the other website I had found. With the basics in place, I focused on a gradient that I had copied from some poor web designer's Codepen, that created a grid like the ones you see in typical retrowavey landscapes. On my old website, it only appeared on the bottom of the first div, and didn't appear outside the initial viewport. On the new one, I wanted the grid on the top, and on the bottom. However, the bottom grid, along with the body's background, had no plans to move to the bottom of the page instead of the viewport. It took some extra weekday evenings and headaches to finally get it to work (by setting the body's height to 100vh instead of 100%, IIRC). The height of the grids change slightly when visiting pages with different lengths, but I can't be bothered to look into it. For now, it looks pretty cool. Still nearly empty though.