100 questions about being a webmaster

1. Please introduce yourself.

hi, i'm kat!

2. How long have you been making websites?

since 2006 on neopets

3. And what got you into the hobby?

the first "shrine" i made was about high school musical...

4. What kind of website are you most interested in?

honestly, ao3. structured data.

5. What's your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly or do you come up with the design as you go along?

i think a sensible directory structure is a good place to start and to deviate from.

6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.

elly.town, ~vilmibm. i've been lurking around the edges of tildes for as long as i've used SSH.

7. What's your favourite part about making websites?

automation.

8. And the thing you struggle with the most?

images.

9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones?

this whole recent run on neocities → nekoweb, i've used static site generators, first eleventy and then my own. so yes i love templates

10. How confident are you with CSS?

super. i don't use it on here, but i also love sass

11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>?

nope. my goal is to barely touch HTML

12. What is your favourite HTML element?

...but i like HTML5's semantic elements.

13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do?

write the content.

14. Do you know JavaScript?

hate that guy

15. How about PHP?

nope

16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to?

like a topic or visual language? i keep topics divided if that helps. as for like, colors, see my stance on templating engines.

17. Are you more focused on content or design?

content and infrastructure.

18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to?

i do for professional website(s) that i have for my career

19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites?

force for good, for sure, as someone who's quit all social media but tumblr and pinterest. it's wonderful to see people take control of their online spaces.

20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check?

i have an html lsp

21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners?

excellent, though i've dragged my feet on making my own site buttons for 10 months.

22. What do you think of button walls in particular?

love them, and love the propagation of everyone hosting their own copies of buttons. it's good for longevity. my only annoyance is mixing button heights carelessly.

23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different?

i'd consider completely different templates that fit in with "retro web" more visually, but the build pipeline would be the same.

24. Are you envious of other people's websites?

somewhat like! i admire people with image-heavy and font-heavy websites that work because that's so Not my comfort zone.

25. What text editor do you use?

vim or neovim. i'm at war with my neovim config right now

26. Why do you use that one?

i live in the terminal and i 🩷 modal editing

27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host?

on nekoweb

28. This might not be relevant to you, but what's your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate?

i appreciate nekoweb's integrations (that i don't use and would tbh rather self-host) as a way to introduce beginners to Git and FTP and similar. i only used neocities for about three months this go around (had a site back in the 2010s), but i'm happy enough with nekoweb.

29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up?

what estimation? we run du -sh: 83MB. most of that is images.

30. Do you keep local backups of your files?

yes, and remote backups in Git, though i don't remotely back up the images.

31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites?

simple. i'm almost okay with no css

32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious?

yes, i'm a big fan of 16-color terminal/text editor colorschemes and make my own.

33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why?

nope! in that i did "amateur" old web as a kid and have continued webdev in more soulless applications through adulthood, and now that i'm back it's feeding parts i neglect while putting together websites for work.

34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby?

just one, really, but i'm trying to find more trust

35. Do people in your real life know about your website?

my sister and best friend do, but they haven't visited to my knowledge

36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"?

there's stops and starts. this month has seen a lot because i'm working on this SSG, but weeks to months have passed between any changes before.

37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not?

naur because i love templates and writing content in markdown

38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused?

hobby-focused. i don't think i'm that interesting, or rather i think talking about my interests and sharing creative writing is way more informative than talking solely about myself.

39. Do you do web design professionally?

not design, but deployment and copywriting, yes.

40. If not, would you like to? And if you're comfortable answering, what do you do for work?

oh god no. i hate javascript and server-side, dynamic shit doesn't interest me. my work is actually in the nonprofit and arts world lmaoooo but open source is a big hobby i care about more. i'm just a very technically qualified starving artist

41. Do you communicate with people by email very much?

no, but i'm trying to be better. i want to move my git projects to sourcehut and embrace git as an email-based vcs.

42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website?

only tumblr, but i haven't closed my meta accounts or anything. i have mastodon for open source reasons.

43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them?

discord and whatsapp. i'm trying to get in the habit of IRC and have irssi open in a tmux session, but idk...

44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists?

horrible answer, no i don't. i am always watching one piece

45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one?

if we're talking casual/hobby websites, then yes.

46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many?

nope, we're at: linux, fanfiction, and mysticism for now.

47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose?

meeeee though i'm trying to be vague about my work

48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website?

hmmmm i'm getting there

49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work?

NO i am writing in markdown right now. if i'm doing a stylesheet that exceeds 50 lines i will use Sass instead

50. What are practices that you think people should avoid?

relative paths and deletion. like it's okay to unpublish but keep local or private copies

51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more?

semantic HTML elements and GUIDs. in CSS i really like flexboxes.

52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?

see above

53. Do you consider different browsers?

i use Librewolf (firefox fork), qutebrowser (chromium-based... ish), and w3m, but i don't do anything rigorous for compatibility.

54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it.

qutebrowser!! the vim bindings are a dream and so much better than vimium as a chrome/firefox extension. and you cutomize it in python. it's so easy and fun

55. And what OS are you on?

alpine linux on my laptop and debian 13 on my desktop and server.

56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it?

well.

57. Are your websites mobile-friendly?

yes.

58. What are your thoughts on autoplay?

i wouldn't ever do this personally but appreciate the audacity of those who do.

59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any?

they're cool i just haven't found any i think i fit into!! and i'm not in love with my subdomain/am thinking of buying one and self-hosting off of nekoweb entirely.

60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page?

nope. closest thing i have is every-basil-hawkins, which is just archival.

61. Are your websites "cliche", in your opinion?

no. and i don't think i've ever thought this browsing nekoweb or neoctiies, either!

62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else?

ao3. i need to hang around the otw jira and contribute, goddamn it, but i admire the rigorous metadata that they manage at scale.

63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets?

nope! all i got is pixel 88x31 stuff

64. What are your favourite resource sites?

for web stuff, just the good old MDN web docs and w3schools.

i just always recommend official documentation for any language or library. i need to be better about using devdocs.io. and my favorite linux distro wikis are arch and alpine.

65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try?

~~shitting on javascript. ~~ my git history is always a disaster, but tbh SSGs (my own and eleventy) make it easier to differentiate "build"/"design" commits from content commits.

66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster?

you have to be doing this on a computer with a keyboard

67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some?

in an ideal world, yes, but the one bit of hardcoding i have is a style="text-align:center;" in my main index <header> because i don't want the header centered anywhere else

68. What do you think of frameset layouts?

idk what this means

69. How about table-based layouts?

i love tables generally. just watch out for screen size responsiveness

70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Do you use any of these?

would love to read about any of these standardized or theorized, but my websites tend to be single-column.

71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS?

html in that i write many words in markdown

72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It's useful for your thoughts.

all the time. it's what i prefer really

73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises?

definitely the latter, very functional.

74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle?

advanced if we're talking strictly static, but i think my disinterest in anything else (server-side rendering, dynamic content) keeps me happily mediocre.

75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit?

yes

76. How did YOU learn how to make websites?

neopets → tumblr → github pages

77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to?

not knowingly

78. Thoughts on floating elements?

can be frustrating! might be why i like single column layouts

79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else?

em always!! i think in terminal colums is why

80. Do you have a favourite font?

they're all monospace, but recursive mono casual, cozette, and 3270.

if pressed i think my favorite serif is STIX two text, and in college i was deeply into anything derived from goudy like sorts mill goudy.

i tend to like grotesque sans-serifs. i also like a lot of frakturs and blackletter fonts, completely inspired by phoebe bridgers' punisher sweatpants that i own.

81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work?

hmm technically i kind of do in that i maintain open source docs sites that anyone can contribute to, though this has yet to happen. but a hobby website... absolutely! the lateral mentorship aspect of it all would be interesting. again, i'm not that into dynamic hosting or things like PHP and JS, and in turn i'd love to show someone around linux as a webdev environment. and the subject matter would have to be something common, like fandom or a character

82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often?

i scroll nekoweb's global feed! but tbh, per my answers to #6, i really like static sites from systems programmers that are just like... purposely underdesigned because it doesn't interest them.

83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours?

ooh my bookmarks are a mess and were in my dotfiles for a LONG TIME (lmao) but i manually visit people's sites and subscribe to RSS in my android reader.

i would be so honored to know but again, my pride is mostly in content.

84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website?

content.

85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect?

like almost exclusively, anything but websites. i like sticking in local filesystems and walking through directories and CLIs.

86. How often and for how long are you online?

defining "online" as in a web browser and accessing servers... not that often! but i am honestly always on a computer. just locally.

87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience?

me! and really anyone who wants to start using linux, or wants to read my fanfiction off of tumblr but not log into ao3.

88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML?

i have beef with XML but i think i conform to XHTML on accident

89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript?

yes!!!!!!!!!! my beloved python SSG

90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one?

read all of the above. the best thing about them is global data files as a sort of single source of truth so if you change a stem or page name, you don't have to chase them through dozens or more HTML files. see eleventy's globals or jekyll collections and data files.

91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not?

nope! because i love static sites + hate javascript

92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones?

the arch linux forums lmaoooooooooo. or random other linux related ones.

93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document?

directly in the editor baybee

94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you're cool?

people do say this...

95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame?

ah man i've felt this in the past but that's just life. it's all growth

96. Would you close down your website if you couldn't update it, or would you leave an archive?

archive!!!! always

97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive?

hmm. secretive in that i think you'd have to read all my fanfiction to pin down a demographic profile

98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website?

i'm pretty solitary

99. And do you optimise the images on your website?

nope

100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? ....other than exhausted.

like more of a webmistress!