I'm an old man so I'd like to reminisce a bit about my favourite hobby. My site which was moosyu.github.io at the time (though it might be that again by the time you're reading this if I forget to renew my domain), started out as a way for me to play games that my school was blocking. This was about late 2020 when FNF was just starting to get big, as well as a certain virus which mysteriously gave me a lot of free time. Around that time I was one of the only people compiling FNF mods into HTML5 to play online so a lot of sites called FREEFNFMODSONLINE were embedding my site in theirs which was my main source of visitors for years. Regretfully I have no backup of that site (at least I think, it might be on some old hard drive somewhere) so right now it could be considered lost to time. Not much was lost though as I wouldn't exactly say it looked good, it was a weird yellowish orange shade with a pretty ugly font that I just grabbed off Google Fonts. If I manage to track down a screenshot I'll add it here.
My webpage was left like that until near the end of 2022 when I go really into the old Geocities aesthetics. I believe this obsession was started by this video by Aztrosist. In particular in that video I saw a flash of Daniel's Virtual Place, likely the biggest inspiration for my site (Daniel added my button to my site by the way which is pretty awesome). I was absolutely engrossed by Daniel's webpage, I probably searched through every page on his site, it's actually the reason I started learning Spanish. But because of this spark of inspiration I full deleted my old site (along with unfortunately the whole Github repo containing it) and replaced it with this beautiful creation that I made in an hour or two:
If you know what Daniel's Virtual Place looks like you'd probably also realise that my site was almost a carbon copy of his. It originally had the little dragons from Daniel's site too but I thought that would be a bit too much even for my unoriginal ass. I'm not sure why I thought that would be too far though as from the buttons to the colour scheme to the background my site was pretty clearly a blatant copy of his. The only things that weren't completely stolen from him were the balloons which I think were the first result I got on GifCities as well as the title text from Cool Text. I'm unsure if I saw the flaming text elsewhere and was inspired to add it from them or just picked it by myself any more but I imagine it was the former. I created this rough version of my webpage in my highschool IT room so the background was actually not exactly what I wanted, I wanted a darker one to be more like Daniel's page but since I was about to get kicked out I just added the first tiling water one I could find. The background actually grew on me quite a lot though, I'm fairly every (finalised) version of my site since then has had it in one form another. Even in my current dark iteration, the background is just a dithered and colour replaced version of my very first background.
My site remained pretty much the same for the next year or two. The final form of this layout looked like this:
Obviously a lot had changed around but it still was, in essence, the same layout. After two years though I had started getting tired staring at the same thing so I decided to remake it, this time with mobile support first in mind which was a feature my previous was sorely lacking:
This time round the default HTML blue had been replaced with a much easier to look at grey which I believe was taken from the Catppuccin colour-scheme. The new sidebar had been inspired by Dimden's site and ThinLiquid's layout at the time. The background also had been dithered which I think made it a little easier to look at as well as making the low quality-ness of it less apparent. The idea to dither was one I got from ribo.zone, I had actually intended to steal more from him but I very quickly learnt I was neither skilled enough to do what he did nor had enough time for it. This layout was made while I was studying for finals which was kind of a terrible idea as it ended up a little rushed but I believe it came out pretty well considering the circumstances (I did alright in my exams too). I had been looking around the indieweb sphere for quite a while by the point so this version obviously ended up taking a lot more inspiration from different sources than my last. A lot of people actually seemed to like this one more than the current one which I get, it's very bright and charming, but also it was a real pain when you were the one staring at it for hours upon hours as I was. For this reason I decided in the next iteration the blue background had to go and I just wanted it to be darker and easier on my eyes in general.
Between that layout and my current layout there was actually a layout that never saw the light of day. Unfortunately have no images saved from that era of my site though this version of my button is a relic of that period:
I was heavily inspired by the beautiful and eye-catching cover of the album Hotel La Rut by Joanna Wang. This version of my site would've had a checkerboard background, a top navbar and lots of smooth hover animation that I was inspired to add after becoming a fan of amoebalous.net. I still intend to add more animations at some point to spice up my current mildly depressing site but we'll have to see if I ever manage to find some that look nice and fit.
The current version of this site (as of writing this) looks like this:
I must've been staring at Poyoweb for too long because I (tried) to make it Frutiger Aero adjacent despite never having seen anything that was dark themed and Frutiger Aero styled aside from a random Discord theme I don't even use. As you can tell, this version is pretty incomplete. The navbar on mobile is almost completely broken, visually its bland and a bit uninteresting to use as well as my button lagging a full version behind. I intend to rectify these problems at some point though as I'm sure you've realised by now my process for improving upon my site is pretty abstract and may take actual years for it to be usable, luckily for me this is my site so it being usable for other people is completely optional.
As of today that's all the layout shifts my site has undergone, not a huge amount for almost five years but quality of quantity or something. I'm definitely of the belief that a personal site is never finished so if all goes well and you're reading this in a year or two my site will completely different and maybe ever better. Thank god for Github history for making my life infinitely more easy.