my site turned one!
happy fucking birthday to my website! shit, i can't believe it's already been a year since i first launched this thing.
okay, so technically its birthday was last week on july 2nd but you know what? i am busy and i forgot. sue me.
anyway, let's talk about the development of this site. when i first launched it, it was just a basic ass link list for websites hosted on various darknets like tor and i2p.
no styling at all, just a single css rule that added a wallpaper on the website and a single image. but hey, i was just getting started, so cut me some slack.
in the coming weeks of july 2022 i decided to expand my horizons, adding a little photo gallery and a rudimentary blog, so my site also had a little bit of personality.
the styling was still minimal, but it did the job, both as a website and at hooking me on learning html and css.
back then i had no clue about good html and css practices, so it was all over the place. the code was so messy it would have been able to kill an actual web developer just by looking at it.
now, let's talk about the first ever link to this site: n5vhnqg7rgb5skqhgjvlrbn6orww4rkctdpsgdsgvangquodt6p3iaad.onion. that shit holds a special place in my heart for some reason. it was the first i ever put myself out there on the web, ever. and it was in the dark web, too. shit was scary. but i did it, and i'm so goddamn proud.
and you know what? i'm also so goddamn proud of this site. yeah, there have been times where i've wanted to haul my fucking computer out of the window because i couldn't figure out why my CSS wasn't fucking working, and times where i had to squeeze my brain out of ideas for javascript free workarounds. shit was draining.
over time, this site has evolved into something really fucking good. it's an actual well-made site, which was also hosted here on the clearnet after i found out about neocities.
i also gotta mention that i can't really host the tor and i2p sites anymore, so they are down most of the time. but i keep the mirrors to them as a memento. i guess that's just part of the journey.
and i also gotta mention that mess that was the months between september 2022 and may 2023, i was drained by my studies of every goddamn feeling of wanting to update the site or browse the dark web for more links to add, but now i am back, at least for the time being.
my initial approach to the development of this site was on creating something that would work perfectly on the dark web, which meant a lot of things, especially my approach to javascript.
let me make one thing clear: i don't have javascript, it's really fucking useful. but when it comes to the dark web, javascript can be exploited for various things and to do some real shady shit.
and let's not forget that most Tor users have all javascript disabled, so if my site relied on it, they wouldn't have been able to use it.
so i used PHP instead of javascript, it was smooth, i just needed a couple of small scripts to add to the functionality and aesthetics of the site back then. i chose it because it was a server-side language, making the actual PHP code invisible to preying eyes.
but when i also started hosting on neocities, i quickly realized that i couldn't use PHP, because apparently neocities restricts it, and that meant i had to update the neocities site and the dark web sites fucking differently, which was a goddamn fucking hassle.
it was not a simple ctrl+c and ctrl+v, but i had to go and check whatever had to be changed and the php scripts that had to be readded again.
but that was worth it, after getting sick of all that updating shit i decided to go HTML and CSS only, which helped me come up with various javascript free workarounds, as i kept my belief of keeping javascript at a very minimal level, if not absolutely no javascript at all. in fact, my site only has only one page that completely relies on javascript, the page being the base64 converter in my project sections.
in the end, developing this site was one hell of an experience, i learned a lot while creating something i feel really fucking proud of.
so, to everyone who's ever used this site, whether it was to find a new onion site or just to kill some time out of sheer boredom, thank you.
and thank you to n5vhnqg7rgb5skqhgjvlrbn6orww4rkctdpsgdsgvangquodt6p3iaad.onion, too. you will always be the first.