1. Please introduce yourself.: hi, im hex
2. How long have you been making websites?: since middle school
3. And what got you into the hobby?: billwurtz.com
4. What kind of website are you most interested in?: i think blogs are really cool, i want to know what's on people's mind, and not in the instant dopamine social media way. people can get really creative with web designs too, the more indie the crazier
5. What's your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly or do you come up with the design as you go along?: both i guess? a lot of the nitty gritty things are very difficult to plan out in advance, you just kinda have to try and see what works
6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.: it's funny because i actually didn't save the personal website that was my main layout inspiration (navbar on left sidebar).
7. What's your favourite part about making websites?: seeing the whole site come together and look nice and presents information in a nice way
8. And the thing you struggle with the most?: learning all the caveats and nuances of all the frameworks i use
9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones?: i think consistency is rather important for a good website
10. How confident are you with CSS?: i use tailwind so like decently confident
11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>?: no, this is my first time using it
12. What is your favourite HTML element?: iframe for sure
13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do?: reset.css
14. Do you know JavaScript?: unfortunately
15. How about PHP?: unfortunately
16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to?: yeah i have six theme colors i came up with in 2021 and i try to have each "section" of the site stick to its color
17. Are you more focused on content or design?: design i guess (see how may 404s i have)
18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to?: four at time of writing
19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites?: i think they're neat, i've made one myself
20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check?: what even is aria anyway man
21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners?: ok i think i just realized these questions are meant for neocities users and not like serious webdev jobs.
but buttons are cool, i've seen a lot of those on my friends' websites. no clue what banners are but if they're the same thing as buttons but bigger, then they're cool too, i've made some in the past myself
22. What do you think of button walls in particular?: the more the merrier
23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different?: i've completely redesigned my site 4 times over the past 10+ years so i think for now im done making "completely different"
24. Are you envious of other people's websites?: more inspired than envious
25. What text editor do you use?: vscode
26. Why do you use that one?: has a lot of extensions i like
27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host?: my own
28. This might not be relevant to you, but what's your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate?: this is not relevant to me but i went and looked up nekoweb anyway, and the homepage struck me as some kind of 2000s nostalgia bait
29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up?: 785 mb at time of writing, but 405 mb is from node_modules
30. Do you keep local backups of your files?: i autodeploy my site on git push so yes
31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites?: as long as i can find what im looking for man
32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious?: i have a palette
33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why?: yes and i have. im back now
34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby?: i dont know any neocities users i think, but i have webdev friends yes
35. Do people in your real life know about your website?: yes
36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"?: sometimes years, sometimes hours
37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not?: i recently added light mode. very difficult to figure out a nice design w my theme colors as they were meant for dark mode only. probably the first and hopefully final major design update i'm implementing for now
unless we count the previous 3 complete redos then i have changed the overall design 4 times
38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused?: i want a place to show off what i've done and what i'm interested in, so it's all 3 i suppose
39. Do you do web design professionally?: yes
40. If not, would you like to? And if you're comfortable answering, what do you do for work?: UX and backend
41. Do you communicate with people by email very much?: at one point yes
42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website?: yes
43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them?: discord is one of them
44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists?: yes and idk man i just put on shuffle
45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one?: i have more than one
46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many?: everything on this site is connected to things ive done
47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose?: wouldnt call it "on purpose" but i dont tend to use my irl name
48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website?: not yet, that'd be weird i think considering theres no interactivity
49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work?: i think not having to work with vanilla HTML and CSS and JS makes it a lot more bearable
50. What are practices that you think people should avoid?
51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more?: its fine to use @apply in tailwind, actually
52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?: i do use stuff like main and section and nav but i also just have custom components for most of those things
53. Do you consider different browsers?: if you use chromium youre kinda just asking for it
54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it.: firefox. its not chromium
55. And what OS are you on?: linux
56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it?: windows sucks
57. Are your websites mobile-friendly?: it better be
58. What are your thoughts on autoplay?: its disabled by default
59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any?: it's a very interesting concept but i'm not in any
60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page?: wtf is that
61. Are your websites "cliche", in your opinion?: no its pretty unique i think
62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else?: a website can look like shit as long as it's easy to find what i want
63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets?: yes & i try
64. What are your favourite resource sites?: fonts.google.com
65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try?
66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster?: please dont use vanilla HTML / CSS / JS
67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some?: does tailwind count
68. What do you think of frameset layouts?: should i know what this is. i feel like i should know
69. How about table-based layouts?: we have grids, it's not 2007 anymore
70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Do you use any of these?: i've used multicol but im not sure if thats what the question is referring to
71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS?: i use tailwind
72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It's useful for your thoughts.: what the FUCK does that mean
73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises?: occasionally former, most often the latter
74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle?: i think people would kill me if i called myself a beginner
75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit?: this isn't really feasible for non-neocities sites
76. How did YOU learn how to make websites?: painfully. had no idea what i was doing until i started uni
77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to?: yes. my splash page (at time of writing) is kinda witchcraft
78. Thoughts on floating elements?: im actually not sure how to recreate float elements without using float so i guess they're a necessary evil for the time being
79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else?: rem
80. Do you have a favourite font?: louis george cafe
81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work?: i kinda already do this at work and as a hobby
82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often?: i discover new personal sites through social media actually
83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours?: i have a few bookmarked for inspo. it'd be cool if my designs inspired someone
84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website?: i think my general design is decently unique so probably that
85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect?: "technology" is way too broad of a term
86. How often and for how long are you online?: too much
87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience?: me. i genuinely dont think anyone besides myself and scraper bots visits my website
88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML?: no
89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript?: all the time
90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one?: no
91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not?: goatcounter. i want to be proven wrong abt my hypothesis in answer 87
92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones?: discord killed the forum star (but my distro has a nice forum which i look at sometimes)
93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document?: markdown files (that get rendered as HTML via mdsvex)
94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you're cool?: no and yes
95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame?: very often i may delete things out of shame but then years later would want to look back at them. i'd like to visit some of my sites from 8 years ago
96. Would you close down your website if you couldn't update it, or would you leave an archive?: oh this is about geocities shutting down and not letting people edit it. i'd probably close it down once information starts becoming inaccurate yeah
97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive?: i think i do but not in the way you expect
98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website?: web services, UNLIMITED web services, but no website
99. And do you optimise the images on your website?: no
100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? ....other than exhausted.: why did i do this during work hours