- 1. Please introduce yourself.
- Tina, transfem furry computergirl.
- 2. How long have you been making websites?
- Sophomore year of high school
- 3. And what got you into the hobby?
- I always wanted a website, but I never had the ability until Computer Apps II
- 4. What kind of website are you most interested in?
- The kind that looks like it fell out of 2001 fully formed
- 5. What's your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly or do you come up with the design as you go along?
- I have a template that I edit in Xed. I used to use Notepad++ when I could still connect my Win7 computer to the internet. Sometimes I'll work from a mockup, especially if it's a particularly complex page with a lot of data to report.
- 6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.
- I don't really have any clear inspirations. The only one I can truly remember with any clarity is a Call of Duty site that my Comp Apps II classmate made that looked like GameFAQs or something. It had tables and inline frames while my site just looked like... well, this. I was so jealous, but at the same time I didn't want to do all those maths.
- 7. What's your favourite part about making websites?
- Being able to CTRL+U on the crap-ass websites that Firespring makes and be able to see precisely where they went wrong (spoiler alert: Wix. It's ALWAYS Wix. Wix sux cox.)
- 8. And the thing you struggle with the most?
- I used to struggle so much with tables. And CSS. Anymore, though, I just struggle with finding ideas to make pages about.
- 9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones?
- Same one across the board. There might be a table here or an iframe there, but everything came from the same template.
- 10. How confident are you with CSS?
- Pretty confident these days. I don't go crazy usually, just some basic formatting. I'm sure my confidence level would go down if I started doing funky stuff though, like borders and unique font styles
- 11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>?
- Never heard of it until I found this document. I can see where it would have advantages over UL, but I think I'll carry on using that more.
- 12. What is your favourite HTML element?
- CENTER. People say "no, Tina, use CSS!" but I'm like, fuck if I'm gonna scroll all the way back up there and define a new span class just for something I'm only gonna use 1 time. If there's something I can achieve using 1 inline tag of old HTML rather than 6 lines of CSS, then it's Y2K again.
- 13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do?
- Panic! Where did my template go?!
- 14. Do you know JavaScript?
- Not very well.
- 15. How about PHP?
- Sort of? I took an online class on PHP once, but I kinda quit doing it. I don't really know why.
- 16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to?
- Yes. Template again.
- 17. Are you more focused on content or design?
- Content. The design is fine (with some minor modifications to CSS every now and then)
- 18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to?
- I don't, but if I did, it wouldn't be for Neocities. Too many unknowns around here nowdays.
- 19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites?
- They always miss the mark. They never truly look like the time they're trying to emulate. They always end up just looking like Facebook or new Wikipedia.
- 20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check?
- I don't know. As long as it works, I don't really care that much.
- 21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners?
- I use them myself, so they're fine.
- 22. What do you think of button walls in particular?
- Fun to look at.
- 23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different?
- Call me a spoilsport, but I have no ideas about starting over again. If my website goes down, it goes down and I never start up another one.
- 24. Are you envious of other people's websites?
- Sometimes, but everyone has their own style and I've found mine.
- 25. What text editor do you use?
- Xed on Linux Mint Xfce. When I could still use Windows 7, I used Notepad++
- 26. Why do you use that one?
- It was here.
- 27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host?
- Very large images that I can't scale down for whatever reason get stored on another host, but most of my images are hosted here.
- 28. This might not be relevant to you, but what's your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate?
- Irrelevant. Both are going to be gutted by internet-restriction laws, so who gives a shit? The ones who jumped ship are going to have a rude awakening when the EU passes Chat Control.
- 29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up?
- At the time of writing, 42.29 megabytes with 1.48 GB of bandwidth use.
- 30. Do you keep local backups of your files?
- Yes. Doesn't everyone?
- 31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites?
- Simple. The more visual elements you have, the longer it takes to load.
- 32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious?
- I pre-selected all of my colours when I established my site in 2023. Admittedly, I used to use F0F0F0 for backgrounds, now I use F0F0FF.
- 33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why?
- Once. I was convinced that some agency or another was going to use my site to hunt me down for being transfem. However, I decided not to because I wasn't about to do the fascist regime's dirty work by censoring myself.
- 34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby?
- Most of my friends are webmasters! My girlfriend actually has a better-looking site than mine.
- 35. Do people in your real life know about your website?
- Yes. Certain of my guides have transcended the Relativity divide and are being shared by people I don't even know. For instance, my "How to Use a Computer Guide" is being used by at least 3 computer literacy teachers that I know of.
- 36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"?
- I do something to it basically everyday. Sometimes it's a big thing, like a new page; but often, it's something small, like a grammar error getting fixed.
- 37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not?
- No. Too many websites seem to thrive on changing things that don't need it. I'm not interested in doing that.
- 38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused?
- I'd say it's more a balance of all 3.
- 39. Do you do web design professionally?
- I used to, but Wix and ChatGPT have kind of gutted my freelance work.
- 40. If not, would you like to? And if you're comfortable answering, what do you do for work?
- I'm between jobs at the moment.
- 41. Do you communicate with people by email very much?
- I try to.
- 42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website?
- I would hardly call my website a social network. Outside of the site, though, I only use Tumblr, and I'm not real active there anymore.
- 43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them?
- My best friend used to have a Nextcloud server. Beyond that, just text messaging on my phone.
- 44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists?
- Game music mostly. I have a long-standing work playlist comprised of SimCity music.
- 45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one?
- Well, I have an older site, SuperForeverCom, that I haven't updated since '22. Hardly anything from that site has ended up on my current one. The only things from SuperForeverCom that I kept around were a scattering of navigation buttons.
- 46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many?
- I cover quite a few topics, even though they all fall under the umbrella of freeing one's self from the corporate feudal shackles.
- 47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose?
- I'm my real self for the most part. I monkey around with names, places, and dates occasionally to keep the armchair detectives off-balance.
- 48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website?
- Yes! I love her so much!!
- 49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work?
- CSS unfairly separates all the hyperlink states into an obnoxious series of codes. With the old HTML, you could define link, alink, and vlink colours within a single tag. With CSS, you need to define every state individually. That's really annoying. Also, what purpose does it serve to deprecate old HTML? Why does it matter how I define my font families? That's annoying too.
- 50. What are practices that you think people should avoid?
- Using generative AI to write your code for you. I mean, really, you shouldn't use generative AI for anything, but for starters, let's just not use it to write our code for us.
- 51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more?
- You know what? Honestly, I miss websites where all the content was presented on a single page with HR demarcations and "Return to Top" links. Those were annoying as all fuck when I was a kid, but I miss them so hard now.
- 52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?
- I've never had this concept explained to me. Someone said once that CENTER and DETAILS are semantic, and I use those pretty frequently. So, the answer is I don't fucking know.
- 53. Do you consider different browsers?
- What "different browsers"? There's only Chromium or Firefox fork projects now. There are no "different browsers".
- 54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it.
- LibreWolf. I used to recommend Firefox, but training its chatbot is one giant security vulnerability. The fact that it has this feature at all points to the fact that, at some level, your data is being exported to an offsite server for analysis and systems training. Like, forget the "analysis and systems training" bit and focus on the fact that Firefox is exporting your data. It doesn't matter why it's doing it, the point is, it's doing it! Sure, you can turn it off, but any malicious update from Microsoft, Mozilla, or even some man in the middle can turn that all back on. LibreWolf doesn't do that. Full stop. And, don't even fucking talk to me if you use Brave. Your browser has been using your computer to mine crypto for literal years, and it's still doing that, but it's also funnelling your data into the Chromium data-collection, AI-training suckhole.
- 55. And what OS are you on?
- Linux Mint Xfce. I want to try out Cinnamon, but I keep forgetting to.
- 56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it?
- It's not Windows. That's all you need to know.
- 57. Are your websites mobile-friendly?
- Kinda? Not really? I mean, mobile Firefox (which afaik doesn't have a chatbot) has a reader view, so maybe it doesn't matter? Seriously though, I am trying to optimise my CSS for mobile browsers. I see a lot of people say "this website will not load on phones and I'm not going to make it load on phones", well, okay, but have you considered that phones are more accesible than computers? Not just from a proliferation standpoint, but most of the modern disability aids are phone-based. If your site's whacked with flexboxes and shit, you're not making your site very accessible.
- 58. What are your thoughts on autoplay?
- Nope. Nope nope nope. Nope nope. Nope.
- 59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any?
- Webrings are a good idea, but I'm not in any right now. Mostly this is because I didn't design my homepage to contain a list of webrings that I'm part of. I wouldn't want to relegate that to some dedicated page because I just operate under the assumption that nobody would go to that page and so the data would be moot.
- 60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page?
- I have a few shrines. The Sims 1 and Sims 3 shrines are more typical of shrine design, but I have a more elabourate Nintendo 64 Shrine that's almost its own website at this stage.
- 61. Are your websites "cliche", in your opinion?
- No. Fandom wikis are cliche. Myspace style is cliche. Facebook Gothic is cliche. Frutiger Aero is cliche. I am not any of that. A bit opinionated, perhaps; sort of a bitch at times, but not cliche.
- 62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else?
- My ideal website is something that doesn't track you, advertise to you, train AI on your data, fingerprint you, or collect data of any kind. I've already reached that.
- 63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets?
- I'm kind of obsessive about that actually. I have a major "not invented here" complex when it comes to my graphical elements (with the possible exception of videogame screenshots). With very few exceptions, I made basically everything.
- 64. What are your favourite resource sites?
- Sorry, loose lips sink ships.
- 65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try?
- Being continuously seated and working for hours at a time.
- 66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster?
- Your site doesn't have to look spectacular. It doesn't even have to look very good to you. It just has to exist. Get it online first, then worry about making it good later.
- 67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some?
- I think we all use inline styling at some point or another. Like I said, I can't be arsed to scroll back up and define a new span class, especially if I don't plan to use a particular style more than once.
- 68. What do you think of frameset layouts?
- 1995 called, they want their HTML back.
- 69. How about table-based layouts?
- Well, now we come back to that Call of Duty fansite my Comp Apps II classmate made, don't we?
- 70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Do you use any of these?
- There's a time and place for them, but I've never needed to do more than 1 column.
- 71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS?
- That's sort of a leading question. I don't agonise over HTML, but at the same time, I spend more time writing HTML because that's where the main content of my page is.
- 72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It's useful for your thoughts.
- Yes. I have a link table to the Internet Archive mirrors of all the Sims 3 Store DLC that I barely bothered to format at all. I was sleep-deprived then, much as I am now actually.
- 73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises?
- I don't use layouts until I need them.
- 74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle?
- I've been around, but I'm not really advanced. Intermediate, shall we say.
- 75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit?
- But for 2 reasons. 1, there's something on the page that I want to nick for myself. 2, the site is annoying the hell out of me and I need to know where the dev went wrong.
- 76. How did YOU learn how to make websites?
- The rudimentary HTML was taught to me in high school. Learning to make cohesive websites came from that experiment I did with SuperForeverCom.
- 77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to?
- Like using a DT to be an ordered list?
- 78. Thoughts on floating elements?
- I guess I'm not as intermediate as I thought because I've got no idea what that means.
- 79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else?
- I used to size stuff by pixels until I discovered that wrecks my site on mobile screens. Now I use percentages.
- 80. Do you have a favourite font?
- Well, my website is properly viewed in Liberation Serif, but I don't force it on people.
- 81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work?
- Riza and I have been talking about co-writing a political commentary blog, but we've both had other things going on lately.
- 82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often?
- Not the web as a whole, no. I used to browse on Neocities occasionally, but I kept hitting Harry Potter fans, so I quit.
- 83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours?
- Sure I bookmark people's sites. I'd be honoured to be in someone's bookmarks list myself.
- 84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website?
- Its turn-of-the-millennium simplicity.
- 85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect?
- I have an ever-growing datahoard on 3 HDD's and a scattering of flashdrives. I collect mostly old TV shows and retro videogames.
- 86. How often and for how long are you online?
- At least 6 hours a day. Most of that is spent falling down Wikipedia rabbitholes, clicking around my mutuals' websites, and editing my own site.
- 87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience?
- People who dream of a less commodified life.
- 88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML?
- Pff. No.
- 89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript?
- The only 2 languages I know are HTML and MIDI. I used to write in Zscript to make Doom mods, but I don't do that anymore.
- 90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one?
- I think it's a good idea in principle, but modern SSG's try to do too much, and of course the majority of them advertise at you. I found this kickass JavaScript-based SSG when I was in high school. It was hella basic, but you could make a really simple website with it really fast. I wish I could find that so I could add to it and make my own SSG.
- 91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not?
- No. It's not a secret or anything, but my site isn't about numbers. I want people who find the site to think they're the only one there.
- 92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones?
- No. I used to be on the Sims 2 forum back in high school. God, I was an asshole back then.
- 93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document?
- I prefer to use Xed, but occasionally, I just skip the middleman and write directly in the Neocities code editor.
- 94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you're cool?
- Honestly, I don't think so. There are way more impressive websites that are a spectacle of graphics and sound. I try to let my site speak for itself and let other people make their own judgment. As for people saying I'm cool? Krystal @ krystalspalace said some really nice things about me in a video she made, which made me smile a lot (which was kind of painful because of how chapped my upper lip is right now; sorry, TMI). She didn't use the word "cool" exactly, but same energy.
- 95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame?
- Not as a web dev, but in other bits of my life.
- 96. Would you close down your website if you couldn't update it, or would you leave an archive?
- My site is the kind of site that doesn't really need constant attention to stay relevant. Back in the old days, you were lucky to find sites that the webmaster updated once a month. SOme of those sites were even finished projects and were never updated again.
- 97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive?
- Like I said, I monkey around with names, dates, and places sometimes in order to keep the armchair detectives off-balance. Also, I have never posted a picture of my own face on any website anywhere (not since 2013 anyway). The stuff I write in my blog and diary can get really personal, but there's nothing in there that you can use to trace me down in meatspace.
- 98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website?
- I would need to discuss it with her first. I don't want to compromise her privacy.
- 99. And do you optimise the images on your website?
- Insofar as I tend to use small JPEGs, yes. Apart from optimisation, that's also how websites appeared in the old days, when memory and bandwidth were at a premium.
- 100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? ....other than exhausted.
- Ow, my hand. I'm going to bed now.
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