the artist and their tool
after several months, i've decided to return to and renovate my neocities / html site with some new ideas and copy over posts i'd made on blog.elaboraet.net in the off-time. there are a few reasons for this, but first ~
i've transformed the homepage's old status board (that listed my current favorite song, mood, etc.) into something much more lively. now, each status category has a cute corresponding icon - sourced from the free tango and nuvola icon sets - and the status itself to the right, seated inside a dark gradient for emphasis. it's a change i like a lot: it's much more colorful and easier to read than the previous list format. it looks pretty, too. (imo.)
other changes include various small fixes to the stylesheet and, more importantly, an easier-to-look-at art page. i rewrote it to display in two columns. this was easy for the most part, but one piece, “sunset,” was a wider image than the rest because i painted it that way. if i displayed it as-is, it generated a large gap between itself and the figurecaption because, obviously, it was wider than the rest and i wanted it to conform to the width of the others - this made it vertically narrower. using hard pixel dimensions was out of the question, because i wanted the page to be responsive. to fix it, then, i eventually used the somewhat new aspect-ratio css tag to define its aspect ratio as 1:1. after that, i set object-fit to cover. this way, the image would “crop” into a square without distorting. in short: style="aspect-ratio: 1 / 1; object-fit: cover; width: 100%”. it seems to work for now. i have also yet to add a tags to the images - perhaps some other time...
adventures in dokuwiki
i initially decided to move to a backend-driven setup like a CMS to serve the website because i noticed that writing to this website, at times, felt like a chore: write my post; duplicate the post template; fit my paragraphs in; adjust the dates, title, and tab title; note the new post on the journal page; and then finally upload it (and the journal page, as well as any images i used) to neocities. this is a lot of manual steps. thinking that this might impede my motivations to post at all, i started to think of solutions to ease the workflow, and decided i should use a server-side software, dokuwiki, to process my writing for me into a web-serveable format.
after tweaking the CSS and a few files of a template theme i had found (an old template called grass-stains, if you're curious), my dokuwiki instance worked very nicely and looked pretty - i could write posts by clicking a button. the built-in editor looks wysiwyg but is not and displays mostly in plaintext. the image-add button, for example, just gave you the syntax to insert an image. there was no actual image preview inline. this was pretty good.
the new button-click workflow was also aided by another aspect: i could write to the page within the page. i didn't need to exit and use another program. i could write, save, publish, all in one place. it seemed like i'd figured it out, and i was ready to move on from publishing manually, writing everything by hand.
however, the cracks began to show the further i attempted to modify the template. to be clear, dokuwiki is a wonderful software and i might just be dumb or impatient. but, over time, i slowly started to encounter quirks and breakages that i eventually decided i didn't really have time to dedicate myself to resolving.
these would include problems like the blog plugin's pagination not functioning and just reloading the page on click of “older posts”; the art page's gallery plugin (or something else, i didn't investigate too deeply) staggering images strangely when i attempted to create the two-column image layout you now see in the new art page; cache on many pages sticking around stubbornly and forcing me to use ?purge=true in the url every other edit (cloudflare isn't the issue); and other little non-breaking quirks i dealt with more easily.
unfortunately, the setup relied rather heavily on plugins that tended to break or show bugs in some of my use cases. on top of this, some of the plugins i used also had poor documentation, requiring me to trial-error some configurations i wanted and figure things out myself. the entire setup had around 5-6 plugins essential to its overall function (blogging, gallery, archive, css editor, directory lister, etc.): any one of them breaking after an update would render the site either partially functional or useless.
i started to feel like i was building a tall tower with wet clay, constantly pushing in the sagging parts of the build to keep it from falling apart while trying to tweak it to my liking. in the end, i felt like i was working against the software rather than with it - i circled back to feeling like i was being held back by the tool i was using.
the artist and their tool
of course, i don't think it really matters what i use to write and post. as some say, what an artist uses to make a piece doesn't matter - the art and the idea itself matters. the novice thing to do would be to blame the tool for any shortcomings, within reason.
i suppose this was more of a curiosity and for-fun endeavor than one that would've led me to discovering a medium that would magically help me write more and better. figuring out (some of) the internals of dokuwiki and seeing how it worked was very entertaining, and working around its limitations even more so. from the perspective of a pastime, setting up dokuwiki and adjusting it for my use was worth my time. from the perspective of my website and posting my writing on a solid surface, however, i don't think it's something i'll be using in the future, at least for that purpose.
2025-02-16