Devlog 11/4/25

Hi everyone. I know there hasn’t been any actual content added to the website yet but that doesn’t mean I’ve been sat on my ass watching Youtube and looking at dinosaur memes. Well I have been doing that but I’ve also been working on adding social media, new features, layout and a workflow which will save me time in the long run.

Socials

Started a BlueSky account (link in the left sidebar) because I needed some way to promote the site. I’ve always hated Twitter but the community on Bluesky seems really cool and there seems to be an awesome neurodivergent community there. I may have let it distract me a little too much!

I’ve also started a Discord group (also in the sidebar). We only have 3 members so far but I’m pretty happy with the structure. I’m confident the community will grow.

In the future I would like to start other social media related to the site but the focus now for now is getting the website, Discord and Bluesky to a level where they don’t suck.

Website Features

Added sidebars with links, added a hit counter (not sorry I love all the old web stuff). While there is very little content here I’m going to get rid of the dead links in the navigation bar. If that’s not done at the time of reading it will be shortly after. Next up will be sharing buttons and comment section for articles. Disqus is the biggest comment plugin but it adds adverts, makes the page load slowly and collects a lot of data so I’m looking in to alternatives.
If I do decide to monetise the site I’ll be doing so in as unintrusive a way as possible and only in a way the community is happy with. Affiliate links and merch rather than signing up to an advertising service.

Workflow changes

So I went with Neocities for the nostalgia factor, it having a great free price plan and good value when I decide to upgrade, I like that you also have basically complete control of your content too. This does come at the expense of convenience though.

The main issue is every time I want to update the sidebars, header, footer etc I’ll need to do that to every HTML page. There might be an easy way to do this that I’m overlooking and I don’t know what sollutions other sites use but I started looking in to SSGs which will do this for me but they all seem to be filled with modern features and bloat I have no interest in using so I made my own. All I need it to do is put all my blog content in the Input folder as HTML, modify the prefix template that contains everything before the main content, modify the suffix file that contains everything after, run SimpleSSG and it’ll pump out all the complete HTML pages in the output folder.