building my bear blog
I was thinking about writing about how Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube are bad and how the Indie Web is good but I have noticed that many people have written about it already. I get it. You get it. We get it. We are all here for a reason. Social media is bad, real human interactions are good. I may revisit this topic later but for now, let's move on.
On this entry, I'd like to talk about the 8-day-struggle that went on from Feb 11th to the very moment I am writing this post, where I pushed the last design change to the blog.
css is the key to being a cool kid
Everything look-wise in this blog is achieved through CSS and nothing more. I throw a lot of shit on AI but I have to admit it was the great webmaster behind the coding. You can use a pre-made template from the Themes page, paste it on your favorite LLM and ask it to modify stuff around. Just make sure to remember that there are some classes and divs already put there by Herman in order to facilitate SEO and render your Markdown post as valid HTML. Try to read the stylesheet before pasting and publishing (and breaking the website) like I did.
inspiration, inspiration, inspiration
Before going full "do-a-matrix-like-website-for-me", try to look for some inspirations and take a quick peek at their CSS files.
For me, it was july the main inspiration for this website design. I found her website at Nekoweb so I recommend you take a look @ their home page for some cool websites to take inspiration from.
I'd like to say thanks to july if she ever reads this for being such a creative mastermind and reminding me how I love CRT and retro looks.
pages and posts
You can create any number of pages you want, just set the is_page attribute to true and have some fun.
guestbook
If you want to set up a space for someone to leave cuss words and talk shit about your blog, I strongly recommend meadow's.
Just set up an account, customize however you want and create a page linking the guestbook to it. The hardest part is getting people to write you messages on it.
should you buy a domain?
It depends. Does the .bearblog.dev bother you? If so, you should take a look at how much it would cost to buy your very own name on the internet. I already had this domain, I bought it from GoDaddy for 5 bucks a year and transferred it to Cloudflare to test some functionalities for work-related things. Kei says Namecheap is... cheap. So try looking there too.
It turned out it was one of the greatest acquisitions I made! Now I have my very own registered name on the web, a customized e-mail domain to mask my real e-mail address and I can monitor usage of the website through DNS statistics on Cloudflare's dashboard.
Disclaimer: If you buy a domain, make sure you check if domain privacy is included. Otherwise you'll get doxxed at a dig command distance.
lessons learned
I never took HTML, CSS and Javascript seriously enough to actually learn it. But building this blog was one of the most satisfactory things I've ever did. Just publishing changes and seeing this little space on the internet becoming a snapshot of myself is something that regular social media could never deliver. The grind behind all the coding is perhaps what makes it so rewarding, even with AI's help.
You must give it a try.
You can thank me later. :)