Long story short, it's fun because it's a special interest info-dumping outlet. the end :)
I started this personal blog site after enjoying the work of making my previous two other website projects; RainyDisco Live and Virbex.
RainyDisco I intended to be like a wiki for my private minecraft server that I have with some IRL friends. For a brief background; I did not originally create the world, it started as a paid realm that a friend invited me to in 2020. I offered to host the world as a dedicated server in September 2024, and have done so since with the original realm owner also being an admin. The current survival world save file has been ongoing since December 2020, and I have put in the most play hours overall. In this time I have been the primary builder of the spawn town (Aridnea City) and a lot of inter-settlement infrastructure like overworld railways & roads, and the nether railway system. I also cartographed the world map at 3/4 size, and have travelled more of the world than any player. All of this is to say I had a mountain of knowledge about this world in my head, and making the website was a good way to get it all out so it could be useful to the other players. I found writing about something I was so interested in was very fun, and it came quite naturally.
I then had the idea to make Virbex with my friend Autumn. We are both huge fans of virtual worlds/online games and thought it would be fun to make a site & blog about them. It took a lot longer to make than RainyDisco, conferring with another person and trying to fit these discussions in between busy work/life stuff. But I also really enjoyed making it as well, learning more about html and the little bit of javascript that the zonelets theme uses. It all quickly made sense and the flow of adding posts and individual pages was pretty easy. I came to really like the zonelets blogging code and was kinda restless not being able to post the stuff I had made with Virbex. This was self imposed, I didn't want to release it unfinished, and wanted it to be a fun site someone could spend at least 15 minutes looking through. I also kept seeing other very cool sites on neocities, but didn't really want to follow them on a non-personal joint account. So that compelled me to make my own blog site here.
I knew I wanted to use zonelets, and that was just easier with one of her themes as well. I also knew the subjects I wanted to write about; my main interests in life, and originally looked into 'Zonelots' because it implements tagging into zonelets. I typically lay out sites and organise things the way I would want to see them, and while using tags would be helpful, I realised I personally kind of get overwhelmed looking at 30+ subject tags on other websites (or information overload in general). So I decided to keep it as simple as possible and make a handful of section pages grouping together subjects. Deciding on the sections was a bit difficult at first but I am happy with the groupings I ended up with, I think they are straight forward enough with a limited selection that is easy to navigate through. Zonelots also required a manual entry into javascript with every new post, on top of doing that with base zonelets already. I figured it would be as much work just adding direct html links in the section pages, and it would allow people to see the posts without javascript if necessary (like on lynx or other browsers with js turned off for privacy or performance reasons). This is a potential accessibility issue I found while making Virbex, that I solved by making a (sadly not always up to date) plain text sitemap. Zonelets populates not only the post archive/array, but also the header and footer. It helps when you want to add more links later, you don't have to edit every page individually, but if javascript isn't active/working then the site is almost impossible to use.
Anyway, I started off with writing some more guide-like posts with the intention of linking them to people I know IRL (linux gaming, youtube front ends, alternate app sources), and some stuff thats more like live online references for myself (recipes and direct links to helpful forums/sites). I then found my blog to be a enjoyable outlet for info dumping about my interests in general. I have a lot of things I am interested in and information regarding them bouncing around in my head, but can't always find other people as interested to talk about them all. There are also some practical things that I have spent a lot of time reading into in order to do properly, and have no reason to keep that info to myself (running windows apps on linux, mobile phone problem, home server stuff). I centre these posts around my experience with the topics, because I am not an expert or even a student of them. I have just found many solutions to technical problems online from other people's posts, and hope that explaining what I've experienced can do the same for others. And regardless of whether anyone finds those posts useful, it is enjoyable for me to write them.
Recently, I've also really enjoyed expanding the site to include the individual computer/console pages. These have some element of blogging as I usually write a bit of my history with them, but they also stand as an easy reference for me and others to look up. I don't have to keep looking up specs and model numbers online, if I pass on a computer or console to a friend or family member they will have easy to access detailed information, and maybe someone else will stumble across them and find useful fixes I had to make. It's also been a good way to keep a log of improvements and changes as I repair some of them.
The above doesn't mean that this is a strictly informative impersonal site though. I don't generally make detailed personal life posts for a few reasons. I don't wish to use this as a journal or an outlet to speak about gripes in my personal life. Dealing with these things personally; communicating with the people around me, or processing within myself, are essential to my mental health maintenance. I would also like to keep some personal information to myself, data privacy is a reason I use neocities instead of other sites or social media. But most importantly; every post I make is personal in some way, whether it is how I write, my clear passion for a subject, the bad jokes I sometimes add, or the opinions I share, you will find me in every post I make.
Thanks for reading :)