Pardon the click bait title, thought I wanted to start off my first (technically second) post with a hook. 

The simple answer:
The services it provided are pretty mediocre for webdev and I never utilized the social features that hosting a site on neocities would benefit from.

The long, convoluted, and wordy answer:
On February 8th, 2025, I debuted the site VelvetLori on Neocities. I updated the site occasionally up until the 20th of February where my site took an undisclosed 5 month hiatus due to IRL responsibilities.
The hiatus was unintentional! I always had the urge to create something for my website, but every time I was faced with the daunting task of coding and creating a new page, I quickly lost motivation and became distracted by other things instead. I should preface that I absolutely HATEEEEE coding. It’s probably one of the few things I hate the most only second to math.
I can respect it as a concept and the people who are willing to put the time to create something out of nothing, but I cannot stand the strict, repetitive tedium of writing down abstract concepts into a functioning set of instructions. I can barely get by with HTML and CSS since its a manner of filling in the blanks and tweaking some numbers to make it look decent, but the moment JS and programming languages comes into the equation…. I’m out! I’m copy pasting a template and winging it from there.
You may be wondering, if I hate coding so much, how am I able to work with wordpress, which uses a PHP system? The answer: I don’t know and I’m scaredand the assistance of an ethically dubious tool that many would frown upon if I said it out loud.
Even then, it took me a week of non-stop debugging to get my theme to the state it is now, and uh. It is a mess behind the scenes. I beg thee, do not inspect element— not out of fear of my code being copied, but rather my code being gawked at. 
Though I will toot my horn and say I’m pretty proud that nothing seems to be broken at the moment and that the music player is completely functional which is a win in my book. (God did that take so long to debug and style, special thanks to Gooby for the music player template which you can find here)
The only issues I’m aware of with the music player is that the music stops if you refresh/click to a new page. The only way to fix this would be to use an iframe system, but that’s a can of worms I do not want to mess with.
Besides, I’ve created a workaround: by setting the playlist to shuffle, a new song plays for each post you click on! Now you’re no longer listening to the same songs in the same order every time you use the music player! Plus the music continuously plays if you decide to toggle the navigation bar off for better visibility!

Now about my site and the plans I have for it in the future  ♪ ♫ 
The biggest overhaul to my website was the decision to downsize into a blog. My previous site was a static page system with different templates for each page. Its great for creativity since you get to design a unique layout for each page! The biggest downsides however, is actually creating said layouts in the first place which I quickly ran out of motivation to do…. (Yes I know, I tapped out after creating 1 unique page only to immediately give up and settle for an iframe format in my about section)
I haven’t exactly given up on creating a website beyond a blog. I still enjoy designing unique layouts for my site; I just don’t have the inspiration or ideas when it comes to the fashion aspect of my hobbies— I prefer to write about it rather than create content for it. After all, my site motto is “Part-time lolita, full-time fangirl,” and I find it more enjoyable to create pages for things like OCs and fandoms rather than my real-life hobbies, such as clothes and sewing, which I only do occasionally. Now what about my old neocities page? Is it gone forever and lost to time? Not really! I don’t plan on deleting the neocities account any time soon (for now) so you can still access the page via the site address or the wayback machine archives.
There isn’t much to lose anyways since I’ve only had the site up for about a year or less with only 3 pages to show for it, though I’ll be pretty sad about letting the links page go since the framed wall layout was neat! (Before you wonder why I don’t simply reuse it here, its because the code is mangled and I’m afraid to touch it even with a ten foot pole)
I took a quick look at some of the websites I had linked on the page and it was a sad sight to see a majority of them shut down or inactive….
I can only hope for the best, wherever they’ve gone ( ;´ – `;)
I know my post title is about quitting Neocities, but I haven’t actually been on the site long enough to form an opinion about its community or social aspects. Though, I will say that once you experience the luxury of having a FTP auto-synced to a vscode folder, you’ll never go back to Neocities’ crummy code editor ever again, it is life changing.

Back to my blog— The only completed layouts as of writing this post is the index and the individual posts. I don’t think I’ll be creating anything too fancy beyond the default blogging format but who knows. I was in a bit of a pickle trying to recreate the community tab on my wordpress theme since I was opting for a different technique to make the lace border that didn’t require making a 2nd <div> for the rotated lace. It didn’t work out and for some reason the positioning of the lace was based off the size(?) or something to do with the header text so it was an infuriating fight of trying to get the lace to stick to the damn container only for it to disappear and latch on to an entirely different element. I swear, trying to move assets but forgetting the absolute/relative hierarchy is like trying to wrangle that one rock in undertale.

One of the concepts I had for my previous site was an interactable closet that displayed my wardrobe; its a highly ambitious project that required cataloging my wardrobe which I, uh, severely neglected to do and will probably have a difficult time backtracking due to a large majority of the products being off-brand shite from taobao that were ordered by a now defunct proxy service, 42agent, which means I wouldn’t be able to find the original order listings if they even exist anymore. I’d end up going on a long tangent about my current thoughts regarding my clothing wardrobe and fashion hobby so I’ll save it for a separate blog post, but anyways I think I’ll settle for a simple catalog that lists out the main pieces I have (e.g. dresses, blouses, shoes) that will hopefully become more accurate once I downsize my wardrobe and throw away the miscellaneous taobao junk I got on a whim because it was cheap. 

Funnily enough, in my first post I said enough was enough and forced myself to take a break from fixing the site so I could actually write something for the blog instead. Yeah I immediately backtracked on that and continued to scrutinize over my code in the midst of writing this post after making the fatal mistake of adding a silly gif and realizing the margins were off….. insert another 2 days of adjusting the code and adding a whole comment section after I realized I forgot to make one too. With that out of the way, I wonder what I shall work on next? Theres a lot to be done and I’m hoping to avoid overwhelming myself on trying to get everything finished as soon as possible…. I’m a bit uneasy that the navigation sidebar is unfinished, since I still have widgets I’d like to add, such as a neighbors panel and a community/web cliques panel! But on the other hand, I also want to finish the tagging system and the about page. Both have their cons since the former requires contacting the sites and webmistresses about my new domain, whereas the latter is going back to the coding mines. AGHH!! Decisions, decisions! I’m going to play a video game and procrastinate instead.

Lori ✦

Currently Listening to:
Negentropy – Hatsune Miku

Feeling:
Sleep Deprived