neocities

I want to use neocities because the social aspect seems fun. The raison d’etre of neocities is to revive geocities, so static website networks. Manual work and design excellence are important to the culture, it would be inappropriate if I used claude to generate a site. Besides inappropriate, I thought it wouldn’t be fun. I use claude to ask questions, remind me of things, and clarify details; so claude is like a textbook that talks back when I ask it a question (I’ve made this argument before).

My site is here.

The w3 grid layout resource clarified that some web design is thinking in boxes. Last night I placed four boxes with various elements—which I recognized as elements! I now had a visual layout along with a small inventory of primary elements that will structure my site. I ran into some issues with implementation. This came from two places: failure to understand css measurements (fr, rem, etc.), and failure to implement a :root element (which I have read about and played with and should know better!). After some upset exchanges with claude I found some moderate success and walked away from my home page.

At some point I switched out of the neocities editor and returned to vim, serving the site to port 8000. I do this with boxhouse too, but I didn’t realize it was a broader concept which is very fun. I had claude explain the connection which was really cool. Computers are like little worlds and that’s scary and not scary.

Neocities forbids its users to modify the metadata of the index file; frustrating because I was using vim. This is why users have landing pages (lol), so I switched my index to “home”, and made a landing page. I had no issue setting up the structure at first, though once it came to style and function I tripped up. I figured I’d need js (elementid -> listener for hover -> increase id size), but claude gave me a css solution which was fine.

From here on, I think I want my index to display some basic html, css, and js features so I have a quick reference. So, I will be going back to implement the current functionality as js (if I don’t completely rip things apart soon).

ffmpeg stuff

FFMPEG is a super cool suite of libraries and programs for transforming images, video, and audio. I used FFMPEG in the past and had plans to use it for data moshing. The tool dithermark can transform a video, so I wanted to do the same to a gif. Claude explained that ffmpeg can handle that. I had it write me a script which worked, but then I decided an application made way more sense.

An application made sense because the script required too much overhead which made use a little unbearable. I had claude code put together the app which serves locally (so python + js).

This tool serves my needs really well, though I ought to understand it a little better. It may be interesting to inquire on its input-output lifecycle. Also, I can see a world where I put together some colour palettes and direct claude to set them in the backend, though I’m not clear how I can exert the control I would like (i.e. monochrome palette with two or three departures; obviously there’s a luminance calculation that would give me what I want but I don’t have that language!).