100 questions for webmasters

Since we recently hit the 2 year anniversary of me starting to work on this website, I thought it would be a good time to try filling out the webmaster questionnaire originally made by mouseling! It's hard to believe I've been doing this for two whole years already. My sincere thanks to everyone who has encouraged all my website endeavors since then. I appreciate your support, whether its by visiting, commenting, giving feedback, or taking the time to read 100 whole questions of me rambling about myself...

1. Please introduce yourself.: I'm Ix and I'm everybody's favorite Final Fantasy fan.
2. How long have you been making websites?: Since 2024, although I did do some simple HTML stuff before then.
3. And what got you into the hobby?: I don't know, to be honest. I found out about neocities at some point, somehow, and thought it would be fun to make my own website. So I did.
4. What kind of website are you most interested in?: At the risk of being too broad, I like sites that I can learn something new, or get a new perspective from. I love sites with essays, or in-depth reviews, or tutorials, or long informative pages about a topic they're passionate about. Of course, I lean towards ones that I have interests or opinions in common with, but if someone has taken the time to do a big writeup explaining a hobby I have zero experience with, I'll probably still read it!
5. What's your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly or do you come up with the design as you go along?: My workflow is "fuck it we ball". I usually have a vague concept in my head, and just edit things as I go until I'm happy with it.
6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.: Some inspiring (to me) personal sites I've found on neocities are doqmeat, kuroi, mioasis, motsdrama, and seafare.
I'm also inspired by a lot of (mostly video game) blogs, like all time bangers, bloomed wings, dreamcastaway, eoan wave ii, florence smith nicholls, and ogre run. This isn't any kind of definitive list, though.
7. What's your favourite part about making websites?: It's a really cool and flexible way to share information. You can format things however you want, share multiple types of media, and anybody with an internet connection can see it.
8. And the thing you struggle with the most?: Despite the aforementioned flexibility, I don't have a lot of creativity when it comes to designing layouts.
9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones?: I use different layouts for different sections of my site. I like having all my “main” pages look cohesive.
10. How confident are you with CSS?: Middling? I can use it well enough for my own (simple) purposes, but there is literally SO MUCH you can do with CSS that I'm not familiar or confident with using.
11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>?: I'm using it to answer these questions, so...
12. What is your favourite HTML element?: I'd have to say <a>. I love links. I love footnotes. I love directories. I love further reading and resources and sharing cool things you found on the internet.
13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do?: Copy and paste stuff from an existing page LOL
14. Do you know JavaScript?: Yes! I try not to make it crucial to navigating my site, but I do love using it.
15. How about PHP?: Nope.
16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to?: Not really. I like having the freedom to make pages about whatever I want.
17. Are you more focused on content or design?: Content, for sure. I feel like most of my page designs are kind of basic or same-y, because once I find a decently readable way to present content, I'm satisfied.
18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to?: I do not. Shoutout neocities for letting me do all this for free! Having my own domain would be cool, but I feel like I'd need more of a reason to drop $$$ on it. Maybe if I ever tried to run a more “serious” website?
19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites?: Everybody should make whatever is most fun for them, and I personally like a lot of retro aesthetics! I don't think they're inherently better or worse than any other design choices. The main thing I judge a website on is content.
20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check?: I think it is, but I don't check as often as I should.
21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners?: They're fun.
22. What do you think of button walls in particular?: It's a cute way to link to other sites, but not the only way. Nothing wrong with a text-only blogroll or whatever. Boosting other sites is the important part. Giving actual descriptions of sites outside of just a button or url is even better, but hey, low-effort options are better than nothing!
23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different?: Probably similar. If I really didn't like my site I would've changed it already. One thing I might do differently if I started over is not naming my site after a video game. After putting so much time into it, I feel like maybe it should have a name that's actually mine and not...copyrighted by Square Enix. But I'm not sure about “rebranding” myself at this point, either. Maybe someday, if I think of something good?
24. Are you envious of other people's websites?: I wouldn't say envious, but I am definitely very impressed by a lot of other sites!
25. What text editor do you use?: Right now, I edit all my pages in VS Code.
26. Why do you use that one?: I used it a lot in college, so it's familiar. I keep meaning to switch, but alas, habits are hard to break.
27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host?: On Neocities. The risks of hosting on another service (which could go down, or get banned) are too great for me to consider otherwise, especially since I don't need to host a lot of large images, like artwork or something.
28. This might not be relevant to you, but what's your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate?: It's good that there's multiple options for making free/cheap static sites? They offer pretty similar services, so I don't think there's much point in debating which is better.
29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up?: According to Neocities, I am currently sitting at a humble 85 MB.
30. Do you keep local backups of your files?: YES. Oh my god please backup your files. Every time I see someone say they only edit/store their website directly on Neocities I get another gray hair.
31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites?: Hmm, that's a tough question. I prefer websites with content I find interesting, which doesn't necessarily correspond to how visually simple or complex they are. Visuals can be interesting content in and of themselves, but so can plain text.
32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious?: I guess orange is my go-to color, since it's my favorite? I like doing different color schemes for pages with different "themes", though, like my shrines.
33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why?: Not really. I've ended up taking some long-ish breaks from updating, but I always intend to come back.
34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby?: I don't have many active webmaster friends, but I'm lucky to have a lot of people who support my site (thank you all my friends who help proofread and troubleshoot!). I have a lot of cool mutuals/neighbors as well...but it would be nice to have some actual friends in the hobby.
35. Do people in your real life know about your website?: I've mentioned it before, but I haven't given anyone IRL the url.
36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"?: Not very often. I try to keep it up to date, but I only manage to get out new essays or pages every few months.
37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not?: I barely change page designs after I post them. I'd rather make new stuff than redesign my homepage constantly. After two years of keeping it mostly untouched, though, I have started considering a revamp.
38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused?: I don't know how to take this question. I guess it's me-focused, since I dump multiple hobbies and interests on it?
39. Do you do web design professionally?: No.
40. If not, would you like to? And if you're comfortable answering, what do you do for work?: I'm not uninterested in web design as a potential career, but professional web design is definitely very different than how I approach it as a hobby. And I'm currently too disabled to work fulltime.
41. Do you communicate with people by email very much?: I do not, but I SHOULD. I want to let people email me. I like to talk to people! I'm just not sure if I should make my existing email public, or if I should make a new one for the site. I promise, one day I'll finally make up my mind, and then everyone can email me :-]
42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website?: My site isn't a replacement for social media. It's way easier to actually engage with other people and have conversations on social media, and I like talking to people too much to fully replace it with shouting into the void of a personal site. That being said, I don't actually use that much social media. I'm mainly just on Tumblr lol.
43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them?: I'm on Discord. I use it to talk to most of my friends. And play video games together, of course.
44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists?: I don't have a specific playlist for working on my site, but my go-to studying/working music is video game soundtracks. Lyrics are usually too distracting for me to do work to.
45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one?: Almost everything goes onto this site, but I do help run a separate site for my longrunning DND campaign.
46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many?: Many. But I do like video games a lot, so that's probably most of my site.
47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose?: I present my real self, or at least part of it? I'm genuine about everything I say on my website, but that doesn't mean I put everything about myself on here.
48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website?: Not yet, but I have had some lovely interactions on here.
49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work?: Yes...? I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough about them to complain. They seem pretty impressive to me.
50. What are practices that you think people should avoid?: Do not edit directly in the Neocities editor. Avoid inline styling. Don't obsess over your site's design to the point that you forget about actually using it to share content.
51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more?: Use semantic HTML! Keep a RSS feed! Make your site responsive and accessible!
52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?: I try! Most of my pages should at least use main, aside, and section tags.
53. Do you consider different browsers?: Yes, but I don't test all of them myself because I don't want to download Chrome. Sorry.
54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it.: Use Firefox because I say so.
55. And what OS are you on?: Windows 11, unfortunately.
56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it?: It's what came with the computer.
57. Are your websites mobile-friendly?: Yes. Are yours?
58. What are your thoughts on autoplay?: I don't love it. I think music players are fun, but I keep mine opt-in, instead of autoplaying.
59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any?: I think they're neat, but a lot of them don't have very strict criteria for joining, so they usually aren't all that helpful for finding similar websites, and function more like a fanlisting. I personally don't join unless I feel like my site really fits the theme, so right now I'm only in the WoL Webring. I have my eye on a few others that seem more focused on aggregating sites with specific types of content, but I've been too shy to apply...I feel like my content is still all over the place! I need to write more!
60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page?: I have a shrine for the Golden Sun video games! I had a lot of fun making it and including links to other fansites and related media, fun facts, and my own personal opinions and relationship to the games. These are all things I like to see in other people's shrines.
61. Are your websites "cliche", in your opinion?: They're certainly not mindblowingly original, but I don't think they're cliche.
62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else?: Interesting question. I would say I'm striving for my ideal website; I only put things on my site because I think they're fun or interesting or useful, which are ideal things for a website to be. I think there is a pretentious part of me that wishes I was the type of person to run a more serious and focused blog, instead. But that's not as fun, so I don't!
63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets?: I've made a couple assets/drawings for my site, like my stamp rally stamps, but I don't really consider myself a serious artist.
64. What are your favourite resource sites?: For coding, I mainly just use w3schools and the mdn docs. For graphics, some favorites are: cutegif, bettysgraphics, graphy, and pixelsafari.
65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try?: I'm sure I have lots of bad coding habits, but I can't think of one.
66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster?: JUST DO IT. I also made a whole page of advice for getting started.
67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some?: I try to keep styling in the stylesheet as much as possible, but I am lazy LOL.
68. What do you think of frameset layouts?: Nothing, because I don't know what this means haha. According to a quick search, framesets are deprecated in HTML5, so I guess my opinion is...don't?
69. How about table-based layouts?: Tables aren't deprecated, but I think their use for layouts is also a holdover from earlier versions of HTML, so I'm not sure why you'd use it now.
70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Do you use any of these?: I don't really know what this means either. My homepage has three columns, some other pages have two or one. Use whatever works best for the page content?
71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS?: I genuinely can't comprehend spending more time on HTML tags than styling.
72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It's useful for your thoughts.: It's useful for my thoughts how?? Anyway, my webmaster resources page has almost no CSS.
73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises?: I've tried making layouts for the sake of it, but I ended up finding it pretty boring. I'd rather make them when I actually have a specific use in mind.
74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle?: In the middle.
75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit?: Not unless I REALLY want to know how they did something.
76. How did YOU learn how to make websites?: By making them. Also, lots of internet searches.
77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to?: Not that I recall.
78. Thoughts on floating elements?: I think I only use float on images.
79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else?: I love % my beloved.
80. Do you have a favourite font?: No. There's so many fonts in the world choosing one is kind of overwhelming.
81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work?: Totally. My DND site is technically shared with five people, but I end up doing most of the actual site maintenance. I would love, love, love to do more collaborative website content, though, which could include co-running a site. My "bookclub" has been thinking about setting one up, for instance (there are no books involved, we just play and discuss a video game each month).
82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often?: Pretty often, I suppose? I'm always on the hunt for interesting websites and blogs. If I like a site, I'll probably also check out their links or blogroll. Sometimes I also just check the neocities global feed or special sauce.
83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours?: I only bookmark sites if I'm busy and want to remember to check them out later. I prefer to keep up with sites through RSS. I would be honored if someone bookmarked mine or subscribed to my RSS feed!
84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website?: My writing, tbh.
85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect?: I don't collect. Hardware and other tech is cool, but not really a huge interest of mine.
86. How often and for how long are you online?: I message my friends and read blogs/articles online basically every day, but time I spend actually on the computer browsing the wider internet varies. Depends a lot on my energy levels and symptoms.
87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience?: Me, my friends, video game enthusiasts, and anyone who finds it interesting. In that order.
88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML?: Haven't really thought about it.
89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript?: I studied programming in college, so I know how to do stuff besides simple JS. But I haven't used any of that for my site. I'm not a Neocities supporter so I don't think there's much besides JS I can use?
90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one?: They seem cool, but I haven't used them.
91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not?: Nope! I had one on the very first version of my homepage, mainly because I was trying to add as much stuff as possible, but it eventually broke and got removed. I rarely check my neocities hits or statistics since I'm not too focused on numbers like that.
92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones?: I'm on the Melonland forums, though I'm not very active there.
93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document?: Depends! A lot of my pages get written straight into my IDE, but the more text-heavy stuff like my /journal posts are written and edited in another program first.
94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you're cool?: People have said I'm cool. Personally, I think I'm a geek.
95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame?: Not on my website, though I'd be lying if I said I don't get a little self conscious about it.
96. Would you close down your website if you couldn't update it, or would you leave an archive?: I'd probably leave it. I'm kind of shocked by the amount of personal sites I've seen get closed down.
97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive?: I don't put much about my personal life on here.
98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website?: I have a lot of wonderful online friends, many of whom have made neocities accounts. Which they don't really use much. Yet. They swear they're gonna get to it someday (I get it, but lmao). So the "best website-having friend" spot goes to my buddy scph1001, who has a super cool game-review site! Check them out.
99. And do you optimise the images on your website?: I resize most of them to be smaller, yeah.
100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? ....other than exhausted.: A little self-conscious! I'm not sure if my answers will be interesting to anyone, but at the very least, now I'll be able to look back on them in another few years. If you made it this far, thanks for reading!