What's a sorbier doing here?

sorbier

nom masculin

Arbre qui produit de petits fruits rouges.

Just a girl, trying to get by and find meaning along the way. My simple pleasures include spicy food, soft wool, and a fruity espresso macchiato.

Metaphysically: about this website

I have been around the internet and back — that is to say, I have made little internet websites for as long as I can remember. With the help of the Neopets HTML guide and Lissa explains, I created fluff sites on Geocities, Neopets, Zuup, and probably elsewhere that I can no longer recall. To dive into early web culture was to animate kaomoji GIFs, to enshrine inside jokes, and to blog about nothing important. It was pure fun through personal expression.

I mourned when Geocities shut down, forcing me to move to Tumblr. Though I love Tumblr for its dry yet earnest community, it isn't quite the same — so imagine my excitement when I discovered Neocities, Geocities reborn.

Website changelog

Design...?

I am not a designer in any sense of the word: I have no formal training, natural instinct for colour matching, or understanding of typefaces. The best I can do is to listen to the experts and, as a fallback, trust my own dubious taste.

My main goal for this site is readability, so the body text is sans serif, set in a large font with reasonable line spacing. Each line is not very long. Markus Kohm insists on this idea in the documentation of his LaTeX package, koma-script, by in turn quoting Hans Peter Willberg and Friedrich Forssmann.

The practice of doing things oneself has long been widespread, but the results are often dubious because amateur typographers do not see what is wrong and cannot know what is important. This is how you get used to to incorrect and poor typography. [...] Now the objection could be made that typography is a matter of taste. When it comes to decoration, one could perhaps accept that argument, but since typography is primarily about information, not only can mistakes irritate, but they may even cause damage.

I can't argue with such conviction. The website is set in system fonts, for fast page loading.

The colour scheme on this website is minimal. I like to read text on a dark background, but I also wanted some fun. Though I tend to be conservative with colours in daily life, like with my clothing, I love purples and pinks. Where else can I choose them with abandon, if not my own personal website?

Build

I built and tested this site primarily in Safari on MacOS (also tested on iOS). If something doesn't quite look right for you, I'm always happy to receive a message.

Handcoding static websites is the only way I know how to make them. I don't know Javascript, PHP, or Jekyll. This site uses only HTML and CSS (except on pages with Julia code, where Prism highlights syntax). CSS is much more elegant than it was in the Geocities days. CSS variables in particular are a joy. Instead of trying to remember each different instance of a HEX colour code, I can just change a conceptually-meaningful variable, then let the style cascade through the rest of the style sheet. I have spent more productive time on my website design now that experimenting with colours, fonts, and spacing is so much easier — though it may not look it.