STAMPS!?
16 August 2025
Well, uuh... Yeah, um. Wow. Okay. So it would seem that the last couple of days I've gone through a real autistic moment there. I've been feverishly making changes in record time, and I can recognize the creative hyperfixation when it kicks in because I PHYSICALLY CANNOT stop myself from working, at the detriment of my basic human needs like food and sleep- But you know how that goes. Strap in for a full chronicle about it.
Day 1: My stamp fever
It actually started pretty much immediately after I published my last (first?) post. I was SO happy to basically have a fully functional blog already, and that it looked as pretty as it did, and that it was only missing the aesthetic part of it. I feel like that's often the key part of my "focus state" triggering; it usually happens when most of the work/the difficult parts of my project have been dealt with and I'm in the "final stretch" to the finish line. Like I can see it right there and I know exactly which steps are left to take and I'm extremely looking forward to seeing it complete. All my usual scheduling prowess just goes out the window, screw writing, screw studying, screw commission work, I'm taking today and I'm DOING THIS. Apparently this applies to website design just as much as it does to my other art projects.
Anyway! I just started going through the items of the list I had just made, and because it was already getting sort of late, I decided to leave the art for later and just take some chill time to look at stamps other people had on their Neocities. Boy, was I wrong about me chilling.
Discovering stamps
I'm gonna go on record here and say that, in spite of me being in Neocities and the organization's explicit goal being to "return to the web of the 90s"... I did not actually experience the web of the 90s, I was simply not around back then. The furthest back my memory will allow me to be nostalgic about was 2010. I have never had my own site before, and I just learned basic programming concepts this year (though I am SUPER glad my first contact with programming was through formal training, it has allowed me to pick it up so fast and start out with good practices). This is all to say: I had vague ideas about what the web in the 90s used to look like, but no idea of what it felt like, if that makes sense.
Cue the stamps: tiny cute graphics people use to decorate their site. Functionally, they're useless, they're just taking up space and are more distracting than anything else (as I have increasingly found most images would back then, as opposed to today's image economy). I remember when I was a teen I would check out deviantArt, and stamps were also fairly popular there, though I didn't really see a reason to make them (especially being so small). I was too young and too insecure about my own work for deviantArt culture to really stick to me, but I got the sense that stamps were a sort of badge of pride, for certain clubs or fandoms to show off. I got that. The concept was alien to all of my friends, though, so I never paid it much mind. Keep in mind, my internet fandom journey started out on Twitter. So, back to the present day, I have a vague idea that decorative stamps and buttons are a big thing around Neocities, so I'm checking them out in order to maybe snag a few I can have at the foot of my page. I look for "neocities stamps", and I am fully and utterly unprepared for the gigantic walls of blinking neon stamp collections that nearly hurt my eyes. Still, I'm transfixed, just scrolling through them, drinking it all in, there's something about it (and honestly about most of the webpages I find in Neocities) that fascinates me, because it's just endless walls of stupid, useless, eye-straining stuff that pretty much only caters to the website's owner. Seriously, realistically no visitor is going to care about anybody's tiny blinkies.
And that's when it suddenly dawns on me. That is exactly the point.
Okay, maybe some of you are now thinking "duh, of course, the sites are supposed to cater to their creator" but really try to put yourself in my place here and understand that I have never. EVER. Navigated through a website that's only meant for the creator's own pleasure. Everything I have learned during my lifetime browsing the internet is that a website is always supposed to educate/inform, advertise products or offer services for OTHER PEOPLE to use as easily and comfortably as possible, which is the reason websites are standarized across browsers, devices and even across cultures. The very idea of a website that only its creator likes to see seems completely contradictory to everything I ever considered a website to be. It's just puzzling.
So. That night, facing the giant, useless walls of stamps, I realized that's exactly what the web of the 90s actually was. Before everything got standarized for the purpose of seamless, easy access to information (and before fellow freaks could easily be found across borders through social media), everyone was fumbling. Or rather... people generally didn't have any sort of guidelines as to how a webpage may be made more accesible, so they just did with their site what they personally thought was really cool. Hopefully, other likeminded people would see the site and think those things are also pretty cool.
Things like decorative stamps, neon colors, blinking lights, animated gifs, aren't there because they're useful in any way, they're there because they're cool. And I quickly found that I do agree. They're very cool. As a newbie programmer, I could immediately see myself during my programming class, doing the exercises and discovering new ways to apply what I had learned, getting excited about the possibilities. Honestly, a lot of stuff in this site is just there because I thought it would look cool. The same thing applies to things like pixel art and image editing. 90s websites were just everyone's personal showcases of what they thought made the internet cool. All of a sudden, I got so excited about getting to be part of that.
The stamp craze begins
There was one particular thing I also noticed, though. Most of the little graphics, buttons, blinkies and art I could find were uuh. Not really me. I suppose being early Gen Z that makes sense, again I was not around when those aesthetic and thematic choices were popular. Mostly, though, people aren't making cute stamps of the media I enjoy, because stamps were a fading practice by the time that media was around.
I really, REALLY wanted my own little stamps, though... I wanted to have my own wall of stuff that I think is cool.
This is how I started gathering images to make my own stamps with, for a purely autism-fueled, hours-long, feverish image-editing spree that culminated in the creation of 65 (no more, no less!) fandom stamps. I made them with a really handy site called ezgif, which is completely online and free and has a very surprising array of image-editing tools. This was before I had even thought of WHERE the heck I would be putting the dang stamps. I mean, the skeleton of my website was already done, and I hadn't planned for 65+ stamps, but they just needed to be there now. They're my own collection. As soon as I woke up the next morning, I jumped to it. After a few attempts at adding a hidden stamp section in the home page (it broke apart my whole layout), I decided to create a new very special page to save all of them. It looks glorious, and you can be sure I'll be making even more stamps for my collection. It could double as a sort of trophy wall for media I have enjoyed! They make me incredibly happy, and you can see them here.
Day 2: It really is my site, huh
Never, ever doubt the power of animated gifs. I kid you not, I finished coding my stamp collection, adding a big red button linking to it on my homepage, as well as putting some buttons on the foot of the page (which I had meant to do anyway), and also decided to put some "about me" badges I found on a little top section of the homepage, for good measure. By the end of it I had amassed such an amount of dopamine that I physically just couldn't stop there. I needed to see this site finished. You don't understand, it just looked so... lived in, already. It's a strange kind of feeling.
Very quickly and without issue (just the way I like my coding to go), I created a couple of boxes in my "projects" page which would showcase and summarize the two projects I'm currently focused on.
So, that art I had decided to leave for later? I spent the rest of my day (and some extra hours of the night) drawing ALL the graphics I had planned to draw. Because this is meant to be my personal blog, it had been my idea all along to use my fursona for the page graphics (I kinda wanna make another post discussing my fursona next, because some interesting thoughts arose from drawing her so many times). I started with the little logo, which you can see in tiny size in the website's tab in your browser, and in a bigger, easier to appreciate version on the homepage. Next, I drew the big, absolutely glorious vertical banner on the homepage as well. I had originally thought of making it feature an array of my chcracters sort of "coming out" of my fursona's head, but then a thought struck me: how can I make this banner as campy and as inequivocally telling of who I am as I possibly can? The current banner is the result of that train of thought (to be fair, I have recently been watching Unicorn Academy with my friend Iggy, so...). Finally, because I had gone to bed so late the previous night and I wasn't that sleepy, I decided to power through and make all the little mascot art for the different blog pages before collapsing.
Have you ever felt like you're in love with your own art? It all looked SO beautiful already, especially with that gentle bobbing animation, my home page now looks STUNNING.
Today: More art, more code, a new little mystery
Gosh, I was almost done with the graphics yesterday, and then my blog would be absolutely ready for me to start posting entries and showing people to my heart's content. Today, I created custom tile backgrounds for the different blog pages, using some free icon pngs, some color editing and this AWESOME site, Tylify. The result did not disappoint, they look super cute and in my opinion, much kinder to my eyes than the placeholder color.
Because I'm absolutely bonkers crazy and I really want to keep my coding knowledge fresh, I had been thinking of a challenge for myself. Notice how the blog pages are composed of little "summary cards" for the different posts? Notice how all of them include an image? Well, it was an aesthetic choice I made when conceiving the look of the website, but images take space to host, and some posts just... may not need images at all (like this one). I had anticipated this issue, and had been looking forward to finding the solution to this. I wanted some little icons that I could use as placeholders for posts that didn't have a special image. Today, I drew three little icons for this purpose, but the really tricky part was figuring out the code for it. Of course, if it was a matter of background image, like with the floaty mascot, I could get that issue solved with the good old CSS class system; for example, give the empty cards the class "empty" and set all "empty" boxes to feature the placeholder icon automatically. Buuuuut I had already set the HTML to be an <img> tag and styled it as such, and CSS cannot change the src attribute of an image. Plus... I am nitpicky, okay? I not only wanted it to be automatically placed (because I refuse to have to copy-paste links to placeholder images every time I make a post), but I also wanted the placeholder to vary a little, for aesthetic reasons (hence why I made three different ones) without having to write different "empty1", "empty2" and "empty3" classes manually.
This is where Javascript comes in handy! I had also used it for the menu interactivity (changing the mascot's look when the user hovers over the menu) and I could use it for this! I had a bit of a rough time figuring it out, but basically the steps went like this:
- Make an array of links to the three placeholder images
- Instruct the browser to give me another array containing all the objects tagged "card"
- For each of the card elements:
- Find the image tag inside of that card
- Read the src attribute of that image
- IF the attribute is empty, THEN:
- Generate a random number between 0 and 2 (arrays always start with 0)
- Insert the placeholder image corresponding to that number in the src attribute of that image
Once I figured out the right instructions to achieve this, the result was exactly as intended! If you go back to the coding blog page right now, you will see this entry has a little placeholder image that was automatically put there upon page loading. It is also randomized every time, so chances are every time you reload the page, the placeholder image will change!
This concludes the chronicle of all the (many) changes I have been making in the last couple of days. I can proudly say that this website is now perfectly ready to start filling with posts! Of course, there are still a few little things I want to try and add, and there will surely be maintenance in order from now on.
There is also one more tiny little problem that arose at some point during this time. Just a tiny one, but one that wasn't there before and has been bugging me the entire day. Don't get me wrong, it all looks very good, I might be a little too nitpicky here, but I just don't understand what's causing the page contents to be just slightly wider than the browser window. It's overflowing just a little bit into the sides, you can scroll to the right a little bit. It's driving me crazy. This kind of thing is always an issue with the width or margins of a particular element, but I have tried changing EVERY element that has a width, even used Javascript to directly read the window's width and set it as the max value. I even tried deleting that pesky failed "scroll to top" button (which I mentioned in my previous post) entirely to check if that was causing the issue. It's like I'm talking to a wall, absolutely nothing changes. Siiiigh... I'll add that to the list of things to improve.
Estoy cansada, jefe.
