The New Website

Hi everybody! In January this year I released the first version of thatonenerd.net. Now, almost a year later, I've barely touched it. In November I decided to replace the old (and slightly crappy) version of this website with a brand new one. It was originally meant to be a one-week project, but ended up, you know, slightly longer. To be honest, I haven't actually worked that hard on the website in that time.

So, school is a little boring. I've got a ton of time in classes I'm good at. Enough time for me to bring my personal laptop to school and work on stuff. That's where most of the website development has been done (along with some other projects, including some easy parts of Nerd_STF). But I hit a roadblock 2-3 weeks into development when it became time to make the download pages for each project listed. It's not particularly hard, but the problem is that the school's WiFi has blocked Itch.IO, where most of my games were. So I couldn't work on it at school anymore, and I didn't feel like working on it at home because other projects were calling.

And it's still kind of like that. You may notice that (at least at the time of publishing), most of the project pages lead to 404s. But I've decided that I'll add those with time. Winter break has given me enough time to wrap everything else about the website up. All that's left are the project pages.

I was originally going to host this website on my own server. I had a Node.JS server written and working, and I was looking into either using my own server with a VPN or getting an online provider, but I decided to stick with GitHub Pages just because it's much simpler and more importantly free. I may eventually use a custom server with more capabilities than GitHub Pages, but for now that isn't much of a problem.

And again, like the last website design, this design has been made with exactly zero website templates or builders. I've designed all of this myself. I've written the HTML, the CSS, and the JavaScript by hand. I'm doing this for a couple reasons. I've always had more respect for people who make stuff themselves rather than using an existing tool. I think this website being made by one person without help is a way to show my skill (and obsession with certain topics). I also don't want something I put time into being squandered by a company putting their marketing on it. Lastly, let's be honest. Reading the HTML or JavaScript of a template website is really hard. Their code is super difficult to understand, and whether that's intentional or a result of automation, I don't like it.

So anyway, that's my rant about this website. There's stuff to do, like the project pages as previously said, but I also want to remake the About Me page because it could be better (I didn't have any time to remake it as I wanted this to be out by Christmas), but overall I think the new website is a definite improvement over the old one.

Well, I'll be making more announcements when more project pages are released, or anything else happens (update for Nerd_STF or another project, or just other rants). Stay tuned!

- Kyle