I've started creating personal websites back in 2020 when I got interest in developing software, especially around the web. I remember watching a crash course of 2 hours about the basics of HTML. At the time I started making random niche websites about Discord bots that I developed, since I was really interested in Python and creating Discord servers & bots at the time (both interests have changed drastically now 😜). I remember that if I learned how to write HTML, that would then help me share my projects to people, however I had no concept of personal sites and even more about the indie/open web like Neocities and personal blogs since I really didn't care or rather know about digital privacy which is something most people on Neocities are interested on!
Fast forward 1 year, I started getting into the weeds of CSS (a path you can't go back btw), and that's when I first searched about personal websites and portfolios. That would get me into various YouTube guides about creating the perfect portfolio and how to make your layout look great. That's also when I find out about Dribbble and Behance where I got inspiration about web design (that to this day I still use).
Discovering Neocities #
In 2023 is when I found out about something called Neocities, I don't remember how but it got me interested. All these sites hosted on this free platform as like a type of social media but at the same time more amateur and personal, I loved it! I still recall the first website I visited, that being OpenBooks.
So that's when this website was born or rather it's first version, you see, my idea with Neocities was to host a secondary website in the type of a web portal, and then have my personal website hosted on GitHub Pages. Some might remember about Eversoul which was the name of that first version of my "personal website". It was short lived and renamed to other names until I landed in the now known SurfScape. In the mean time I created a second website on Neocities which you might guess it's this one, and you are right. So when I "closed" or rather rebranded Eversoul, I had deleted my main website hosted on GitHub since I had a free domain for a year which expired so the logical idea was create one from scratch and host it on Neocities.
Procrastination #
Everything was fine for some months on my personal website, the same couldn't be said with my web portal that had suffered 3 rebrands, the main issue is that the project was just to ambitious for me and not only that, I have a lot of procrastination so you might see what happen, the web portal would be empty for 2-3 months straight without any announcements and when I got the hype to work again, then my personal website would became "abandoned" as well.
I also have the issue with always messing with design and decide to redesign the entire thing one day and then rapidly get tired and push a half-baked website. You might say that SurfScape is currently like this but I found the main issue with that happening, I'm now learning to work on a project and that project only until it's stable or complete for me, which is why I finally have my personal website alive again!
About Blogging #
Since the website is much more mature I will be finally blogging again after almost a year of a break. I'm not saying that I will be writing every day, week, or even month, but I will try my hardest to be consistent and have new content at least 4 times a year (I hope that number will grow).
Future Projects #
With all of this talking, I wanted to talk a bit about future projects that I'm working on or rather planning, one of those being a redesign of SurfScape (again) that will finally use SurfKit. As some people voted, the design will be similar to Apple's website and iOS UI with a touch of Material 3, some people might be with their jaws dropped after reading that, but yeah, SurfScape will convert to the minimalism side and the current web 2.0 gradient and glossy design will be dropped off. But that does not mean SurfScape will become a corporate website, this change will actually help make SurfScape more community driven since SurfKit will come with support for themes where you can create your own theme for SurfScape with it's own colour scheme, this also means SurfScape will finally have options for Light and Dark theme. In terms of the layout, I still haven't planned that but you could think of it as a notebook of sorts? Will see in the future I guess 😁.
Wrapping Up #
So this was a bit of a story about my start on creating website and some updates about the stuff I do. I hope this is not my final post on this website 😔.
Thank you for reading and checking my website!!