inaugural blog post

hi there. while i’ve had a tumblr blog for a good long time i’ve never actually used it to… uh, blog. i’m a little unused to the concept, but i wanna see how it suits me. i do like to talk about stuff, after all. i have no idea how often i’ll post, and i have only a vague idea of what i might write about. i really linguistics and stenography, but i don’t know how much i have to say about them. what i hope, though, is if i have a place to talk at length about stuff i think is cool without holding some poor soul hostage while i do, i’ll do just that.

with that said, i figured i’d talk about making this website. i’ve liked the idea of having a personal website for a while, but i knew i didn’t want to use squarespace or whatever. i had to use sites like that to make mock personal websites for a couple classes, and i learned i just wasn’t going to be able to get the level of freedom i wanted over the design that way. ultimately, i didn’t want to work from a template: i wanted to come up with an idea for a site layout and make it myself. even as i was working on those sites for school, i knew if i was gonna make a personal website that was actually for me, i was going to have to use good old html.

a couple years went by before i actually got around to doing so. one main thing that kept me away: i just don’t like coding. i have cried from frustration trying to understand basic coding concepts. it requires a kind of thinking i’m not used to doing. if i put the time in i’m sure i could get better at it, but i like doing other stuff and there are plenty of trans women who can code. because i know i have trouble with this, it took me a while to work up the energy to learn html. i would start reading some tutorial, only to stop a couple lessons in and not come back to it for months. i only really started to get anywhere near the end of my time in school, and now that i’m unemployed i don’t have much else to do. the tutorial site i actually wound up sticking with for whatever reason was html dog. the mdn web docs are very useful as a reference, but i found them kind of overwhelming to use as a tutorial.

as i learned more and started putting what i was learning into practice, i came to realize that html and css, despite being edited like code, don’t have most of the features of coding i have trouble with. html is, at its simplest, pretty much just a non-WYSIWYG word processor. a lot of it’s features are best suited to rendering academic papers. html lists the words and the images, and css tells them where to go. getting those words and images to look just how you want them can be annoying sometimes, but i’ve never gotten overwhelmingly frustrated with it. (i have had to ask my girlfriend for help quite a bit though. thanks babe.) once i grasped the basics enough to know how to look up what i was trying to do when i got stuck, it just became a problem of writing and design. and that is my wheelhouse. that said, i don’t fuck with javascript. javascript is evil.

although i started out making this website with just a bunch of plain html and css files, i had the sense that running a blog that way would be pretty annoying to maintain, and that annoyance would probably keep me from doing it. all the copy and pasting and manually updating the post list just seemed like it would be a real drag to me. i probably would have done it that way anyways if my girlfriend hadn’t convinced me to use hugo. thanks babe. hugo is a static site generator and i only sort of understand what that means. learning to use it took some getting used to, but now that i have everything set up it’s nice to be able to just write a markdown file and have a blog post. i wouldn’t be any good at explaining how to do this but i found this tutorial on how to convert a plain html site to hugo and this tutorial on how to use hugo with neocities to be the most helpful, along with the hugo documentation for reference. do note if you also try to do this: you do not have to have a theme for hugo to work, and you do not need to make a custom theme! it makes everything way more annoying!

i’m probably going to redesign this site at some point, and there are some things i still need to get working. still, after a lot of work setting all of this up, and the time i spent learning html, it feels like all that work and time is coming to fruition. i’ve made my website. now i get to do things with it. now to just… figure out what those things are, exactly…