1 Year of wiggle.monster!

December 30, 2024

To set the record straight, this website has existed since 2019. However, I started actively working on it again in November 2023 and bought the domain wiggle.monster in December 2023. So although this is not technically the anniversary of this site, in my mind it is, so I am going to celebrate today.

It isn't that hard to believe that I have been working on this website for over a year now. But what is hard to believe is just how much that both this site and me have evolved in this time.

When I first made this site in 2019, it was made for 3 purposes:

Safe to say, the website didn't really get much usage from me. It was just kind of ugly, uninspired, and had nothing of note on it.

In November, I was browsing websites in a hotel room when I thought "I want to do this." And so I started working on a brand new homepage. The homepage felt inspired, and I was having a blast making it. I was having a blast, and after publishing the page, I thought "this is what I want to do".

So... I started converting old pages to the new design style. Granted, there wasn't much of a style before then. But I also started making new pages. Pages for interests, blog pages, stuff like that. And it was awesome. It was something I could finally be proud of.

Making my own website was awesome. I wasn't posting here to stay relevant, I was posting for me. Everything was in my control. That isn't to say social media is completely bad, not everyone can create a website. But this place feels more personal than a Twitter or TikTok page ever could.

Over the months I got better at making websites. My CSS became more organized, looked better, and actually did what I wanted it to do. Learning a new CSS feature is one of the most dopamine inducing things.

With that being said, not everything has been perfect. There are still times when I have been frustrated. Layouts not working as I expected, or me getting caught up in my vanilla HTML CSS JS tech debt. I still think I over complicate some things (for example my Git setup), but I have still managed.

Working on this website has taught me a lot of useful skills:

All very important things to learn.

Thank YOU

When I started working on this website again, I had just over 10,000 page views. I currently have 171,354, which is insane to think about. Yeah, some of them are web crawlers. But even pretending that 25% of those are bots, that still means that 128,515 and a half times a person has decided to visit my website. If you think about it, that's a lot!

This is even crazier to me when I realized that I have over 500,000 hits. A hit is each time that someone views a page. That means people are actually looking at the stuff I post on here.

The craziest thing to me is that not only that people are looking and exploring this website I made, but people are actively reading the blog posts that I write. I don't have any analytics collection things on this site (except Google Search Console, because I find reading the search queries that resulted in my website appearing funny), so I have no idea how many people are actually reading these. But it feels weird that I'm not just screaming into the void.

On my guestbook I have also gotten so many nice messages. And when I see someone inspired by a design I created, it makes me so happy. That's what we should all be doing here, inspiring each other to make cool stuff.

So for everyone who reads my stuff, lurks, or even follows me on Neocities, thank you. I really mean it.

Going Into 2025

With everything said, there are some things I would like to change going into 2025.

First, making the site more "stable". Currently it feels like my default CSS style is a little too complex. Plus, the maintenance required sometimes isn't worth it. When I change something, I have to check I didn't mess up 30 pages. I want to be able to stop worrying about this.

Next, the navbar needs to actually be on each page. Currently, the navbar is inserted with JavaScript. This works, but there are better ways to go about this. I'm just happy the noscript fallback even works.

Finally, I want to interact with other sites again, and showcase more stuff. I love being able to show things that I think are cool. Of course, this can be a pain, as websites move or get deleted, but I think the payoff is worth it. I know I haven't been as good about this in the past few months.

Conclusion

I don't really know how I'm supposed to end this. It's been an amazing first year, and I'm so happy with how this site evolved. I cannot wait for the next year and everything that it brings.