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- webmaster's log -
~ january 6, 2023
it's a new year! after a lovely break back home full of visiting friends, skating, and skiing, it's time to get back to business before the semester starts. i've been working on setting myself up for grad school, finding a new apartment, and most importantly, updating my website 8)
i've done a lot of updating, both on the front and back-ends of the website, and i'm very pleased with how it's coming! here are the new additions:

- a comfy landing page that greets you upon arrival
- a gallery of my fingerboard creations
- a simple guide containing tips on how to make your own fingerboard
- a switchable light/dark mode theme
- a new cursor that looks like a skateboard
- and a few tasteful animations that make the site feel a little bit more alive

i am very happy with the state of things now. so much so, that i think it might be appropriate for me to relaunch this site. i'm unsure of which platform i'm gonna use. i've recently discovered neocities, and it looks like a cool solution. not really what i want though- i'd prefer to have my own, private setup. as far as hosting goes, i'm not sure what i'm going to do. i also need to look at available domain names to see which good ones there are to choose from.
~ december 15, 2022
wow! it's been a while since i have been able to work on this bad boy. i got completely absorbed into the 9-5 life as i was working at my co-op. it was a great time, i learned a lot about writing software, and i'm happy it went so well. now that i have my free time back, i have decided to completely renovate this place. i have actually been working for probably a week or so without doing any logging- just little pieces here and there to get it to where it is now. my domain subscription ran out while i was working too <rip trali.blue> :(
i stopped paying for hosting, and one of my new focuses is to get this baby running for free.
basically, i have stripped the styling away and adopted a far simpler layout. here's what i was previously rocking:
and this is what i've stripped it to:
we'll see where this goes! ultimately though, i just wanted to have something that was easier to manage. i found myself getting tangled up in the css due to poor implementation choices and felt like i was spending way too much time on trying to style the webiste to match the way my domain name, trali.blue, sounded. i would rather spend my time focusing on actually building the website out, which is why i'm almost relieved that my domain subscription expired. now, it feels like there's some room to breathe and i can start from scratch again!
~ june 30th, 2022
okay so it's been a bit since i've logged, and i've been working on the site a lil but really not that much over the course of the past month or so. school has picked back up, but i accepted a position for my final co-op and i am super relieved! i've recently changed how some of the borders look on the nav bar, and i've added a whole new log! the plant log will be a place where i keep a gallery and notes of my garden and i hope to add a section for my indoor plants too. i suppose that's all that's really changed since the last log.
~ june 30th, 2022
today was a day of maintenance and growth! i have expanded the journal to include an old book log that i would like to breathe some life into. there are some missing titles in there in-between East of Eden and My Ishmael, but to be honest i can't be bothered to go back and populate it. i added the East of Eden entry today just because it was such a profound book to me that i felt as though it deserved a spot in the log. i've also tweaked the animation that draws around the navigation links. next, i'd like to add a border like is under the navigation links around the left and right of `main`. i haven't tested it out yet but i have a feeling it will look quite nice.
~ june 16th, 2022
the past few days have been quite productive and i am quite happy! i began to look into whether customizing the styling of the auto-index feature is possible, and it indeed is, but it looked like a can of worms i'm not quite ready to get into yet. it required the installation of a module for nginx, but even just installing a module appeared to be quite an involved task. it looked like the module was maybe only avaiable for nginx-plus? i'm not sure, but i do know that when i attempted to install the module through the package manager it was never able to find it, and when i tried reinstalling nginx with the --include tag, it also told me it didn't know what i meant. so, i decided to move on and work on the general aesthetic of the website. i think this marks the 4th complete visual overhaul of this website, and it's still mostly just a wasteland.
the previous b/w aesthetic of the site
that being said, i did log in to my old account on futureland.tv and found an old book log i was keeping a few years back. i think i'm going to expand the journal part of trali.blue by adding categories and keep the development log separate from other logs that i would like to keep. this project has been a blast, and interestingly enough i've been working on it more frequently now that i'm in classes again... strange how i manage to find the time to work on this rather than homework, but i'm not complaining.
~ june 14th, 2022
great progress today. i did some research on nginx and discovered that nginx has a handy 'auto index' feature which happens to be exactly what i have been looking for!!!! i was looking for an easy way to simply display a directory without needing to format the html or do any configuration of a database, and this does exactly that. now, what used to be my 'files' page is my 'basket'. in its current form it will just be a simple interface to access any files that i would like to get later, or send to friends. i'm very excited, this is the first step to distancing myself from 3rd-party file-hosting platforms!
~ june 4th, 2022
first entry! this will be a log of how things are going with the website. even though i've been working on getting it set up slowly for the past few months, it's finally in a position where i feel like marking progress is worth the effort. it's mostly been learning how to navigate this vultr server i've rented and installing NGINX onto it, configuring all of that business, etc. not super interesting tbh. now that i've been able to get it online for real and have a few pages thrown together, i can start looking at transforminging it into the website that i want to have. today, i have very little homework so i'm taking a bit of time to experiment with hosting files on the site. i just want some sort of a easy-to-access directory that just holds some files, like code from my last programming languages lab, and allows for an easy download. eventually, i'm really going to need to get my formatting for this site figured out..
~ later, that evening...
okay, so that was way easier than i thought.. i had no idea i could simply link to a local file with an <a> tag to make it to be downloadable. very simple and very fast success! still doesn't help me necessarily make an easy-to-populate directory though for file hosting...
~ project spawn: nov 2021 ~
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