The History of This Website

The website first began in 2022. I wanted my own website where I could showcase my own works, and I wanted to code it from scratch (which is explained more in this article). I wanted a place dedicated to my art, comics, and writing, especially the PrincessPandaSonicverse subsite, where I would lay out and organize information about my Sonic the Hedgehog headcanon universe. Plus, I would have my own place for links to my socials.

I aimed for a playful, cutesy style I would make with CSS on MediaWiki. Pastel red and blue color scheme, rounded corners, and hearts, especially in the background, galore. Modern web design was too boring. You could say my style reminds you of GeoCities from a long time ago.

I used Netlify, a host I had previously chosen for its easy ability to share HTML files, which was a Scratch project version of the Sonic Colors intro in my case. The website was launched as under construction, like I would for a wiki I launched on Fandom, all with the intent I would finish later.

I used to draft website layouts in Trinket, so I was able to find the oldest layout there is still, all the way from 2022.

For the longest time, there were some additions here and there, most notably the Mythical the wolf graphic, the subsite for my Sonic fan comic Silver Scripts, and a directory of web experiments made as practice, but my website lay mostly dormant. College and ADHD procrastination took up my time. Due to how Netlify worked, it wasn't even available on Google Search!

It was only until May 2024, when I first launched My Theme Park Tycoon 2 Buildlog, that I decided to put my site on Search via Google Search Console. I also published my website's source code on GitHub for Netlify's sitemap plugin to work; this allowed publishes to be automated via pushing commits to GitHub.

The following is the earliest version of this site found on Wayback Machine, from that time.

As you see, the site had glaring rough patches that could've been passable for an amateur creation, but not if it wants to be taken seriously. Like, empty spaces where images were supposed to be, the "Other works" button not working because there wasn't a page for that, misaligned socials icons, and a notice admitting the website was incomplete. I still linked my website around on my socials.

It was only until August 2025, when I was taking the year off college, that I began to work on the website seriously. I wanted to make it the best it could be, within its original design, because I didn't want it to go without notice. I thought like a web developer and scoured for such information. Here were some of the changes that I made, along with the fixes of the issues mentioned above:

• Search engine optimization (SEO) boosts through metadata tags (such as descriptions, canonical URLs, and Open Graph and Twitter Card info for social media!), usage of helpful document label tags such as the heading tags, robots.txt, a manual sitemap nicer than what Netlify's plugin generated, and all lowercase filenames with dashes instead of spaces
• A custom domain, because Google Search treats websites under the "netlify.app" domain as low-quality for some reason
• Removal of the PrincessPandaSonicverse subsite (you should've seen how horrid it looked and how bare it was, and it remained there for a long time!)
• A favicon!
• Usage of Netlify redirect rules instead of meta refreshes implemented directly in HTML (seriously?)
• Usage of different sizes of images and in the file format WEBP for faster loading, as well as "lazy loading" images that aren't at the page's top
• Alt text in images!
• Usage of links styled like buttons instead of pure buttons (Google does not crawl them!)
• Capitalization of page names
• Schema for search engine bots to obtain information about me and my works (isn't that cool?)
• Web analytics tracking by Umami
• The Mythical graphic going behind the text box instead of overlapping with it, because that was a nightmare to deal with for different resolutions

(Thank goodness I put my website's source code on GitHub! I can track all the revisions I made since the repository's inception.)

My Theme Park Tycoon 2 Buildlog was added in May 2024. I wanted a simple blog structure that would fit with the website's vanilla (no fancy libraries and frameworks) system, so I made it so that each page would represent a month and have the month's posts, all in the same page. At least there were permalinks for each post. (I promoted my Buildlog on social media for some time, and because of the lack of metadata tags, the site's social media cards were nearly bare.)

Silver Scripts was added in March 2024. I was going to code my own webcomic structure, but then I found Rarebit, a vanilla webcomic template. This was exactly what I needed, so I took it and altered the layout to my taste. (As part of the upgrade since August 2025, I modded the Rarebit template so that each comic would have its own webpage title and canonical URL, so that the subsite could be more Google Search-friendly. Spoiler: It did not.)

My website had been vanilla for a while. Just plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, that simple! However, with several pages already, it became cumbersome. To update the overall layout, I had to edit the code of each page! There weren't a lot of pages, just the homepage, article, a blog with three pages, and a directory of web coding experiments, but this website was set to expand. This is where static site generators come in.

I chose Eleventy, which I heard was the simplest static site generator. It may be easy for when you're starting it, but I was converting a website to it, and I wanted to preserve the functionality it had. Some parts were tedious, such as converting My Theme Park Tycoon 2 Buildlog from a manual set of pages to dynamically created ones via pagination, optimizing images in a way there would be the same hierarchy of them (Spoiler: I ended up not doing it), and more. I will write a blogpost detailing more of this.

However, I got the conversion done in November 2025. As seen above, the website remained pretty much the same! Thanks, Eleventy.

(The Silver Scripts subsite was not changed due to it being built with a pre-existing, different template.)

Taking advantage of Eleventy, My Theme Park Tycoon 2 Buildlog also got a table of posts per a month's page, and the heart buttons and "fun blog" (like the TPT2 one) page navigations were turned into reusable components.

This was a new "mini" version released in November 2025, shortly after. You may have noticed that the font is different, the background is lighter, and the logo now has a white outline as if it were a sticker.

For the fonts, it turns out: The fonts that Microsoft Windows has are proprietary, which means they are not free to use in software. I loved the Century Gothic font really much, but I have to follow the rules to be taken seriously as a web developer. I used the fonts from Google Fonts, which are free, instead.

For the graphics, the changes were made because of accessibility. Accessibility is important in web development, so that everyone can access the information online regardless of their disabilities. The logo was given a white outline to stand out against the heart pattern background, and the hearts' color was lightened for less visual intensity and to let the heart buttons stick out more. As a result, users with lower contrast in their vision can easily see the information and features needed to use the site.

(Just a word of note: Color contrast checkers are helpful, but are not absolute, as they rely on mathematical operations, not how human vision actually perceives contrast. Checking color contrast mainly depends on your eyes, using simulated vision deficiency modes, and perhaps enlisting people with various vision deficiencies themselves.)

As seen below, Silver Scripts was also given the makeover, with the new code font (at least Orbitron was already free) and new link color. (Regarding the logo, I tried opening the SVG file in Inkscape, it looked messed up, and I forgot how I exactly created the logo. I don't want to ruin it, so...)

To be continued, like my web dev journey...

Last updated November 17, 2025