So a few days ago (specifically the 21st of Feburary, 2025), I was talking in a group chat and the topic of personal sites came up, I mentioned I was interested in the idea, but had no clue where to start since I assumed HTML was this hard thing to get into. I was directed to neocities and turns out they have a really simple and easy to follow tutorial on the basics of HTML. So once I did that I decided that now was the time, the Penn Stuff Site would finally come to exist!
It was quite easy to pick up extra things that weren't in the tutorial, either by doing web searches or just cross-referencing with other sites and copying what they did (god bless inpsect element). One thing that struck me was that I was manually setting the formatting of each page seperately, so if I wanted to add a little badge to the "footer" at the bottom of the page, I'd have to copy the code to every single page of the site. Surely there must be some way to automate this, I'll reap by ignoring it for now to build up the site, and sow by having to update a lot more pages once I figure out the method that will be incredibly obvious in hindsight I thought to myself. With that in mind I thought of a joke about my rough beginners code resembling that of YandereDev, and made a quick post to my bluesky account and thought nothing more of it.
The next day I wake up with my notifications inbox absolutely full.
I'm guessing the use of "HTML" within the post itself pushed the post onto the algorithmic feeds of quite a few people (I personally tend to stick to the "following" feed on bsky). While big number is always nice to see, it was even more interesting to see the responses people had.
Quite a few people weighed in with solutions which was appreciated! It seems like the general consensus was that there is (surprisingly) no built-in way to generate a dynamic header/footer that persists across pages directly within my current tools, I'd most likely have to run some kind of script to pull from a different file and insert it into the page, and while that would probably be better in the long term, I don't feel like doing that right now. So the site jank will remain a problem for future me!
As said above, big thanks to everyone who reached out with advice, and hope you enjoyed reading this! Come back in a few month's time for Part 2, reaping what I have sown
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