Olly Junkyard | Blog

Today I've been going through the site and checking its accessibility and code organisation / cleanliness. Spoiler alert, it was not very good lmao. I've gone through each page and started just updating them to be as fully usable with screen readers as I can, adding alt text to images and making sure elements use accurate and more fitting semantic tags, instead of the div spam I had before...

In doing all that I found out how frustrating it is to make Windows Narrator actually read the thing you want it to read. Maybe its just because I don't know how to use a screen reader, or maybe there's some sort of learning curve, but it still seems unreasonably irritating to use. I looked online a little and saw some people call it "the internet explorer of screen readers" which I found funny. But anyway, if you happen to be using a screen reader, hello! I hope the changes are noticable and the site is at least bareable with your screen reader! I'd like to do more testing with the other really popular ones I learned about, but I will also keep Narrator in mind too, just because I assume its the one most people have access to, even if people mostly use different / better ones.

As for the internal code clean-ups, that was mostly me trying to reduce the amount of div spam / excessive nesting on each page, removing unnecessary divs / tags which either were completely useless or could have their properties safely moved into a parent div / tag. This kinda just paired really well with the accessibility fixes to everything, because both of those involved looking through most of the code on the site and making it more simple, readable, relevant and well formatted. It's been fun, and I'm not done yet (and likely never will be). I plan to keep up the accessibility work, improve upon it, and learn more about it for as long as I'm working on this site.

Aside from that, I made a few tweaks to the visuals of the site, changing the button hover animation to be something I think feels nicer, and also a little more responsive and also a little more functional by changing the text colour to black and also increasing the font weight when hovering over the button. The brighter colour of the hovered button state was making the white text a little harder to read, so it was a simple fix to an admittedly pretty small barely-an-issue issue. I also made the corner rounding more consistent too. The navbar elements all had different corner rounding values which I hadn't noticed until yesterday, and then had to fix as soon as I realised. Oh yeah and also I noticed the dates of the first 2 Blog posts said the wrong year, they said 23 instead of 24, which I ended up noticing while changing all the years to say "2024" instead of "24" because Microsoft Narrator kept reading it as "1924".

I think thats all for this post. Hopefully the next site update will come with some content! I'd like to add more photos to the photography page and also finally get some stuff up on the art page! The About Me page is also completely empty still, I'll figure out what to put in there eventually. I know I want that page to be here, but I also don't actually know what to put on it lmao. Anyway, talk to you soon :]

Happy spooky month! October is finally here and I can't wait for everything to start getting autumn and halloween themed! Speaking of which, I have been trying to make a spooky / halloween theme for the site, but I'm very new to HTML and CSS so I have been struggling a LOT. I'd like to just have a toggle at the top of the site to switch to a spooky theme, and I would also ideally like that to stay consistent when you change pages. Unfortunately I haven't had any success with making that work using only HTML and CSS. I've seen a lot of people do that kinda thing using JavaScript, but I don't know if I would ever like to touch JavaScript at all lmao.

Anyway, as you likely saw, the summary mentioned slower updates so I will get to that now. I've been pretty busy with doing some stuff in Blender, and also getting ill, and also having life things to do... all at the same time... so I haven't really had much spare time to work on the site as much as I've wanted to (and believe me, I really wanted to). I should hopefully be able to keep updating this page with new posts every few days or so, but actual feature updates to the site, and larger page updates (like actually finally putting anything in the Art or WIPs pages...) will take a little more time as I won't be working on them frequently, or for very long at a time.

I do, however, plan on spending a day in the forest soon. So I'll get a bunch of photos to put into the Photography page >:]
I think I've learned a bit about taking nice photos since the last few times I went, so hopefully I can get some really nice ones :D

Ok, that's all for this post (because I need to sleep). Goodnight for now, and see you in the next post :]

I spent most of last night working on the Blog page so I could actually get to using it. The text from the homepage has been moved into here too in the two posts below. Getting the expanding/collapsing post system working was a nightmare. I tried doing a weird method I found using the focus property and giving the text box an index, then using the focus property in CSS to unhide the main body of the post.
It was really janky and if you clicked anywhere on the screen after opening the post, then it would close again, and I just found that kinda annoying. It also meant you couldnt select text, or click on any links if I were to add any. I then moved on to a checkbox and label system, which was even more difficult to make work, and even more frustrating. I spent ages trying to make that one work because it allowed the post opening to work as a toggle, so the post would only close when you clicked back onto it again. I just couldnt get it working with multiple posts and I was close to giving up (this was after about 3 and a half hours of struggling), until I by pure accident stubled upon someone talking about makig collapsing tree menus. I was curious what that was about so I took a look, only to find out that the exact thing I had spent all this time trying to to put together using methods that bordered on dark magic... was just a normal HTML feature, fully natively supported... So yeah that one was painful, but I quickly got that put in place and now look! Cute, neatly organised posts! I'm especially happy about it having a short summary of the post so it's easy to find interesting topics, or to just get an idea of what you're in for :D

Im really happy with how the site is coming along so far, it's been really fun making it. I think next I would like to try setting up the Art page and then filling that out a little, and then finally get onto the About Me section. After those two it'll probably be WIPs, then Archive, then some new pages which I might link to under a main parent page called like "Experiments" or something. Just a place to try stuff out without disrupting the main site's themeing, but while also allowing me to play around without restrictions / wanting to keep the theme consistent.

If you are here and reading this, I hope you like the site so far! I'd love to try adding one of those guestbooks or a comments area that I've seen on other sites, it would be cool to hear from anyone who comes here and looks around :]

The Photography page now has a few things up to look at, and also every page currently up now has its temporary layout sorted!
The site is officially somewhat functional! I have some big plans for the different pages, I wrote more about what I have in mind for them on the pages themselves, so go check those out if you'd like :D

I'm happy with the progress on the site so far, especially for this being the first time I've ever done anything like this. The Archives hasn't got anything written about it yet, so basically that page is going to be a little site history page, where you'll be able to look at the site from the day it was started to the present day.
I like keeping records of my progress with creative projects, and this site is no different. I've got some screenshots of my progress as a complete beginner to HTML and CSS. Maybe it could serve as inspiration or motivation to some? Either way, I'm mostly making it because I think it'll look cute lmao.

I finally caved and switched to using VSCode instead of forcing myself to use the neocities editor lmao. I knew VSCode would be better but for a bit I just couldn't be bothered to make the switch. The Live Preview Addon alone makes it worth, and the autocomplete is also very nice to have. I just have to figure out how to push updates to the neocities site now. (Chances are I updated it this time by drag and dropping the file, if there are better ways then please do not bully me)

Hi! Welcome to my site :] I'm very new to web development and design and all that stuff. I started on 21/09/24, so I'm currently just getting used to everything (It's pretty fun though I can't lie).

I'm making this site as a way of sharing stuff I make and things I find cool. Once the site is a little more ...functional... I'll try to keep updating the different pages so they stay up to date with my latest work, thoughts and photos :]

I've not really been enjoying posting on social media too much so I felt this could be a cool and actually fun way of putting my work on display online (and also yapping extensively about things I find interesting).

If anything is or seems broken then don't worry about it for now, I likely just havent gotten around to making it yet. Feel free to go explore and find out which pages I've actually made, and which ones could maybe even have anything on them at all :D

Oh yeah I did try to make it mobile friendly and adaptive, but I've had mixed luck with getting that working consistently across different devices. Last I checked it was working just about well enough, but not quite perfectly. I will get round to making it better eventually, but for now I'm happy that it's at least usable enough on mobile :]
If you'd like to come back later to see the progress on the site, you can follow my page!