❤ vegetablearian.com ❤
History of vegetablearian.com
I had my domain from 08/02/2001 until a few years ago, maybe 2019. I didn't do anything with it for the past decade or so, and I was mainly annoyed to lose my email address. I found neocities, and started realising I wanted a site again, too. I was fairly happy there and reasonably happy to be vegetablearian.neocities.org (which I still kind of am - I left what was there with a link here). So I resigned myself to never getting my domain back.
On 20/09/2022 I was checking out nearlyfreespeech.net, seeing how I could have a domain + hosting for less than I was spending on a neocities subscription, and trying to work out what I'd hate less: vegetablearian.net (too "I lost the .com"!) or vegetablearian.org (too... organised...). I have never wanted vegetablearian.co.uk, so that was never in the running. I even considered the new TLDs...
I checked another site to see all that was available and there it was! My beloved! My vegetablearian.com! And here you are on that very same site :)
vegetablearian.com rises from the ashes like a weird purple phoenix...!
neocities-era (2021-2022)
We are still on the same design! Just a different iteration. Most changes were below the hood.
This is the 4th version of the new layout, but you'd probably only tell it from the 1st by sight. I'm now generating it with a little python script - here it is, with instructions, if you want to do the same.
My first neocities layout, pretty similar to this one but more vertical (and with the header/footer manually included on each page, which got old pretty fast!):
The second and third layouts had frames if you didn't have javascript enabled (it was how I worked on the site too because I didn't want to run a local server). It was so cute, square and fat, and I kind of miss it already:
Though, as you can see, the differences are quite subtle apart from the page scrolling!
Original vegetablearian.com-era (2001-2005)
Here are some of my old layouts. I wish I had more!
I was always super proud of this one and its "chromeless popup". Dreadfully sorry this site doesn't do anything like that. It does take heavy inspiration, as I'm sure you can see.
I'm not sure this one ever went live. In my archaeological excavations of my own surviving files and what was cached on the Wayback Machine, I think I went straight from the dotted line layout to the doll layout. But this was my approach to graphic design, and I still love it.
The background of the current site is a little bit similar, just in terms of all the layering and effects. I don't tend to write Nirvana lyrics all over everything any more though (should I change that?)
I loved this one, and the rainbow panes on this current layout are inspired by it. I don't think that oil painting filter or whatever it was on the doll has aged well, though.
I got really into making illustrations with the photoshop vector tool around this time. I used to mostly trace photos and put big dramatic sunbeams around them, but this weird little bird man is based off something I used to doodle everywhere. It's the symbol of some kind of cult I started with my school friends called Cow Foetus Pride. No, I don't know any more than you.
I still like the colours and the shapes of the layout, though. I also think more websites should be taking place out of doors.
This layout features Arina from Waku Waku 7, who was the basis of most of my teenage usernames, including my online fake name as you've seen in most of these screencaps. (Why don't we do that any more?) As you can see, I had no idea how to even try to render a nose.
I liked this layout a lot (and I still do, though I've gone off the logo font since then), but it was for a time vegetablearian.com's tombstone, because it never got another real update. In my early 20s I had aspirations of Writing Articles and I changed everything to redirect to a Wordpress I never posted on.
vegetablearian.com wasn't my first site. That was the Purple Petz Palace, which I made mostly in Word. Isn't the side-to-side marquee banner fun? And slightly eye-searing. My current site is really quite classy... almost bland...
PPP was mainly a Catz 3 site. That's still my favourite Petz game. I don't know when I made the site, but I found out through the Wayback Machine that I updated it on the 24th of December, 2000. And my family always celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve. What a dedicated little webmistress I was. Didn't last :) I hope you enjoy my site anyway. Thanks for reading!