On Friday the 13th, October 13th, 2023 this site was launched.
A year ago, having next to no knowledge of how to build a website I started one anyway, after follwing tutorials and lots of trial and error, I got something resembling a website. I would get ideas for new pages or ways previous pages could be improved quite often and spend hours trying to make it work as I envisioned. At first it was a very simple website with some info about me and links to my social pages, but I very soon got very ambitious.
Soon there was a full blown bio page, a project page, I quickly ran out of things I could add that were serving the purposes of having all my stuff in one hub. So I moved on to more fun stuff. Links to other sites, many other sites, and eventually links to Youtuber's I liked, and guides for doing stuff. May 24th 2024 I added Earworms as a way to show what was stuck in my head, and hopefully expose you to some music you might not have heard before. I added Mantis' Desk which is incredibly time consuming to fill out, it's fun but honestly it is a LOT of work to make new desk items.
A year later I still don't know much about building a website, but I'm having fun, and that's what counts right?
It’s hard to believe it’s been a year to the day when I started learning how to build a website, I love working on websites, it feels like an interactive art piece that can constantly be improved with small little bells and whistles, it’s unlike most of the other art forms I work with.
Unfortunatly now I don't have as much time to work on any of my art as I would like, I have a full time job now, and I enjoy it but I miss the time I had to really spend some hours working on the site, but rest assured it is not going anywhere, I love working on it so much.
I was looking through my screenshots and found one of the website from 2/14/24
You can see that instead of making a GIF of the arcade cabinet I had a short embedded video that did not loop properly, I also don’t think I had the divider lines yet, I think those really make the site look great
You can also see that I last updated the site on Valentine’s day, which means I probably took this screenshot after I finished adding the Valentine’s day teaser to the Black Cherry page.
I'd like to talk about the future of the site for a moment. As far as solid plans for new content I don't have much at the moment. This page is defenitly going to be a part of those plans, because I launched it for the first anniversary of the site, I did not have a lot of time to think about formatting and making it fancy, I will defenitly be giving it a remodel or two as I get time. Other then that I will probably slowly add some more stuff to the Other Sites page, new sites I have found, fill in some more Youtube recommendations, and I wanna add some more how to guides, I only have two right now! I think THE LIST needs a change in format as well, that's going to take some time and many many internet searches. I'm kinda bummed that I don't like how that page turned out because it took so long to even get it like that, so I am not likely to take on that task any time soon. I also think a "back to top" button is in order for some of the longer pages (looking at you Other Sites) but I would wanna make a graphic for it so thinking about that might take some time.
I would also like to be able to take this site off of Neocities at some point, don't get me wrong I love Neocities, this site would not exist right now if Neocities was not around, but I would love the additional freedoms that would come with it, something I will be looking into.
Honestly I thought I was going to to find more screenshots when I went to look, gotta remember to take more for when this rolls around next year.
I may write more here as I think more about what this site has meant to me in this year so far.
--Mantis, 10/13/24
I may not have many screenshots, but I have something better, The Wayback Machine.
mantis-friend.neocities.org from Feb 4th 2024 I had requested the site be crawled and archived on The Wayback Machine at one point, but looking at the archive now, it seems as though it has been crawled 4 different times, so thats cool!
I linked the oldest one but it might be fun to look at the 4 diffrent crawls to see how the site changed over the months.
--Mantis, 10/20/24
Who knows what else the future may hold...