Short history of the page
The page started out with a fairly generic look that is documented in this post. That post also contained an honest analysis of what worked and didn’t work for me in that first draft. I liked the Tokyo Night styling but found that it clashed with the fish tank themes and hated the font. I struggled a lot with the page not being Neocities enough, because I loved other peoples creative retro stuff with GIFs and tiled backgrounds everywhere and really nice pink/peach themes. I failed to provide examples back then, but I was talking about sites from the ‘recommended’ page, like PetraPixel, Lazer-Bunny, Sakura Dreams or doqmeat.
I also started to realize that I don’t really have any use for pages other than the blog. But my instinct at the time was to try and push the styIing more into a generic Neocities aesthetic and go harder on the fish. Both aspects I found theoretically fun and wanted to explore, but my concluding sentences were prescient.
The deeper I dive into Neocities, the more I see other, more sober designs and other blog-first pages without shrines. […] Last week, I changed the colors into what I find a more Neocities-aligned Hanami-colored and pixel-fonted version. It might just be a different kind of generic, but I am more at ease with it.
A new, blog-first design
Indeed, it was just a different kind of generic, and I grew tired of it quickly. I wanted hypothetical readers to be able to focus on what I write, not signal that I was part of the artistic Neocities crowd. I am not! The pages I linked above were intricately crafted over years by people who are passionate about their art and web design. I can only imagine the sweat and tears behind the manual placement of all these elements. After not really knowing what this page was going to be about, I found out that the writing is really what gives me joy. I’m the guy in the group chat who is responsible for 90 % of the text. I need an outlet so I can send my friends a single link instead of forcing them to mute notifications. My personal space is a space where I can collect words, thoughts and feelings, not art.
Since I now actually transitioned my workflows into the terminal to a large extent, an ambition I had for a while, I spent some time styling Neovim, kitty terminal, starship and opencode, my current replacement for Cursor. I landed Fira Code as my font and Tokyo Night theming across the board, but Catpuccin is really popular in these circles right now, and with good reason. I love all variations of the theme. I prefer Tokyo Night at work because it’s a bit calmer, visually, but the two have a lot of similarities.
So that’s what I ended up using in this current iteration of the website. A terminal-inspired minimal styling with Fira Code as the font and Catpuccin as the theme with a light/dark mode toggle on the top right. I never use the light mode, but I enjoy the toggle. By cutting out a lot of the fish stuff and pages that are not the blog, the CSS is about 300 lines lighter now than it was in the last iteration. I really love the page right now. It’s not Neocities ‘recommended’ material, but I neither deserve nor want to be that.
RIP in peace, peachy pink page
So, this is the official tombstone for the monstrosity that was the Neocities-aligned Hanami/arcade/whatever page styling that lasted, like its inspiration, only for a short while. Good riddance! Let’s hope that the new style lasts a bit longer. I love messing with the design and having a new look, but I would like to have more stability in the blog’s look.