welcome!

published 2/24/2025

hey there! i’m vance (or vae), and this is my new blog…!! ✨

i’m so excited to be back on neocities…!! by which i mean… i made this account 5 years ago but then i never actually did anything with it and i forgot about neocities for a long time… so i’m excited to be finally actually making something of it..! i guess when i say “back” i also mean, back to making weird little personal websites like i did as a teenager a million years ago!

see like, a few days ago i was thinking “i want a new blog”—not like my art blog or my dev blog which are more serious and formal… i wanted a blog just to post some random musings and off-the-cuff things like that. when i was chatting with some friends asking where folks blog these days, amazingly one of them reminded me that neocities exists!

the funny thing is, they brought it up in the context of saying “neocities isn’t very good for a blog” (because of the overhead of updating it manually)… but i thought about it some more, because i WAS already considering the idea of rolling my own self-hosted blog with a static site generator anyway, and the SSG would handle a lot of what’s difficult about blogging, right? so what was left was just “too bad it doesn’t have an automatic ci/cd pipeline like netlify” (hi yes i’m a nerd) — but then i did a little more digging and, hey, it turned out there IS both a github action and gitlab ci script for automatically deploying to neocities!!!

by that point, i was also diving back into browsing some neocities sites and well.. really just falling in love with the platform all over again, and with the movement of reclaiming our own weird, hyper-custom little corners of the internet. one of my favorite sites that i encountered during that process was petrapixel btw! i actually found it just by googling “neocities 11ty” to see if anyone was using 11ty for their neocities site, it pulled up a tutorial from them about how to use 11ty, and then i just went and explored the rest of their site from there… and i had such a big feeling of “YES, this is what i want to make!” …for a little while at least,,

like. for a few days i was really excited about this idea of building a new neocities site… but then i did a dumb thing and decided i was going to use the Astro framework for my blog, which is totally new to me and just another shiny new thing i wanted to tinker with as usual, but like, i convinced myself to wade through the whole “build a blog” astro starter tutorial because i mean, building a blog is what i wanted to do anyway, right…? well.. the problem is… following the tutorial kinda sucked all the inspiration and excitement out of me :( so now its, a few days later, and a lot of that joy i had around creating this site has actually disappeared thanks to depression and ADHD,,,, sigh. so. i’m still trying to keep building it and make it a thing, but, we’ll see how that goes… i really hope that the inspiration picks back up soon?

anyway, thanks for being here! here’s the way i introduced myself on the neocities discord recently:

hello everyone, i’m vance (they/them pronouns), super excited to be here! I was SO AMPED about Neocities when i first heard of it 5 years ago, i ran to make my site ASAP… and then… i didn’t actually do anything with it for those 5 years besides just have an index page saying hi 😅 but today i was talking to my friends about wanting to start a new blog and someone suggested doing it on neocities and i was like!! HECK YEAH THAT’S PERFECT and so i spent a bunch of tonight looking around other neocities sites and just falling in love with it all over again 💜 there’s still nothing on my site yet but i can’t wait to get the blog going!!

about me:

• 33 y/o, transmasc non-binary, queer, neurodivergent, disabled
• into all kinds of art and crafting (including coding, IMO that’s just another type of art!), cozy games, TTRPGs, journaling, personal knowledge management, and learning about mental health
• i am currently learning to become a ""professional"" (ha) web developer and i am more than happy to help anyone with their coding dilemmas or with the learning process!
• fun fact: i had a legit Geocities back in the day and YES i DID use a table layout with a drawing of my OC in the sidebar. still hoping that someday i’ll find the code/assets from that old site buried on some hard drive and be able to resurrect it.

so yeah! we’ll see how this goes! but i’d love to meet some more neocities folks in the process~ i’ll try to add a comment widget later, but for now, feel free to drop a comment on my neocities profile or catch me at one of my social links to say hello :>

also looking for webrings to join maybe??