So you coded a website, and showed all your friends.
Who are you, to build such a monument? What was it all for?
When a week passes, where will you be, Ozymandias?
Too arrogant to let the present pass away; too dim to dream a brighter future; too many semicolons. It doesn't come off how you think it does, Ozymandias; it's not as common of a writing convention as you think it is.
If you intend to persist, you must cleave deeply to the purpose of your website. Is it a podium to present your creations, your trophies, gleaming and perfect? What good would that do anybody? Perhaps a workshop to demonstrate your methods. To show your art before it becomes emotionally evocative, before you've polished away any of your true feelings. I've always thought you have some trouble being emotionally vulnerable, Ozymandias. You dig far too deeply into the soft sand. If you're extraordinarily lucky, perhaps those who look closely are truly interested in what they find. Don't hold your breath.
Anyway... The music
Adding music meant new challenges for the website. Actually making the little players wasn't so hard, but dealing with compression killed me dead! It'll sound great in my DAW, so I export it to a .WAV file which is supposed to be lossless and not digitally compressed, which means they're bigger files. That would be a problem if I expected a *ton* of site traffic but it's ok and they sound nicer than .MP3 files, and I play the files from my desktop and the files sound great, but when I upload them and play them on the actual page the volumes of everything gets all messed up! I wound up exporting a couple new versions of the songs I said I'd stopped working on just to tweak the levels so they sound better on browser.
Do you know what, though, I forgot how much fun it can be to work on music! Genuinely excited to make more now. Maybe I'll fix my microphone setup, even. Recording stuff in a house with other people in the house is sooo embarrassing, though, despite the fact that it is literally the same as any other kind of performing. IDK, something about throwing a bunch of blankets over your head for acoustics, holding the mic tight to your face, fiddling with a bunch of different wires and buttons... it's disempowering.
Not all great news
I've been working on ways to add, like, text fields people can fill out, that kind of thing, but it seems like the easy ways people make forms & comment sections and all that crap isn't really possible through Neocities as a host. Basically, that sort of thing usually functions through a .PHP file, which is a little like your .EXE files. It can read and write information between other files. Neocities doesn't let you do those, unfortunately. They only want to host static websites. If I wanted to add reader-submitted content, I would need to figure out a way to embed or link to something outside of the site that could collect that info, like a Google Form, and then it wouldn't be able to change the site for you in real time in any way. Or I could switch hosts, but... that sounds like a hassle. I guess it's a hassle either way.
For now, if you want to comment on my site, you'll just have to reach out to me some other way. I had been entertaining the idea of an advice column - that could be pretty funny, I think - but I'll have to figure out some ways to do text fields first.
Is every single blog gonna have some weird poetic section?
Thanks for reading. That's about all I had in the past week. It's been starting to get busy again! Lots of Shakespeare.
If you enjoyed this, let me know! I love getting feedback. If you want, you can even write me an email. If you send a message to notjamietorrel@gmail.com, I'll read it, but I won't reply! In... case... that's appealing to you? I don't know. I have an Instagram, too, but you probably already knew that.
I always say I want to follow through with these large-scale personal projects. I never really do. I've heard once that showing your process to other people can help, even if you're not done with your art. I guess it reinforces for you to keep going. I don't know if that's true, but it's worth a shot, right? So thanks for the help!