❤ vegetablearian.com ❤

Websites are fun!

Actually websites can be kind of a pain in the arse, but I think they're worth it!

Building a website

I make my site in Notepad++. But I don't make the 50 billion pages by hand, and you can probably see that it's neither php nor frames, either. I use my generator to stitch a header and footer to the content. It's super cool :)

If you are scared of HTML and CSS, don't be, it's literally so easy a child can do it. You could start with a template or a tutorial, and learn by both looking things up and looking at the guts of websites you visit and stealing their code :) It's fine if you don't memorise everything - I personally am always still looking things up - but look: a website!

Hosting

I used to be on neocities, geocities replacement as the name implies. It can be totally free if you are destitute / a child / generally unable to pay for things online / just sticking your toes in the water. If you want to pull your weight (and that of the mentioned categories) it's $5 a month, which is reasonable even if your currency is presently tanking against USD like mine.

You get personal benefits for paying (on top of the glow of being a contributing member of a community): you can host all kinds of files (in my case, like images for direct download, zipped and loose mod files), and you get way more storage too (though I never got close to the free limit personally!)

For a bunch of reasons that I'm restating for maybe the 3rd time on this site (and it's still so small...!) I left neocities for nearlyfreespeech.net when I got my domain back. The payment scheme is cheap and terrifying. It's PAYG, costs about $1 to deposit, costs like $2 a month or less to host a small site like mine. I got my domain through them too, so that's more, but I'm still going to pay less here than I did at neocities (even taking into account, again I'm on the mid-tier even though I don't need to be because I read that the lowest tier doesn't actually pay for themselves fully).

OR MAYBE I WON'T PAY LESS! Every day I could wake up to a drained account and an offline site. Like I said, terrifying. But it's not really likely.

Stats

I still miss my adorable Korean digimon(?? I think??) hitcounter. I thought about something similar for the new site, but I think they're a splash page kinda deal, aren't they? And I don't have one any more.

I am totally and utterly against google analytics and the like. I'm not going to put something on my site that I refuse to load on anyone else's! Anyway, I don't want to feed my visitors' data to anyone, however non-intrusive the info. I have totally innocent intentions, it doesn't mean anyone else does.

So, I turned on the apache access logs and I'm feeding them into GoAccess and getting cute little reports to ooh and ahh at but not actually understand in any way. (But it's nicer than seeing a novel about all the shitty little bots trying to hack my non-existent wordpress, I guess?) If you want to install GoAccess on Windows, you can do it with Cygwin as they advise, but you don't need/won't find in the Cygwin installer "automake wrapper scripts" (or it's automatic, idk) and you do need libmaxminddb-dev which they don't mention. Also, you have to set some mandatory things in the config (timestamps formatting?? Why can't it just run with a default lmao?), which is somewhere in your Cygwin directory (the error when you first successfully unsuccessfully run it will tell you the path hehe) But it works!