#oldskool blog layouts

[anna-neko]

here's a true damn sign of brainrot; not the silly fandom term but true legit cannot brain, the cells have rotted away

self, u know how to do shit like this. You were doing it for more years than this platform existed. For half your damn life; both for yourself & most of your friends** Editing a bunch of images, keys smashing away HTML codes to override half of LJ/Geocities/Blogger bullshit to make sparkling perf layouts **Weird Al lyrics, that was me! ♪♫ got a business doing websites /When my friends need some code, who do they call? / I do HTML for 'em all♫♪

Yes, TD/TR tables are replaced in favor of much more flexible DIV .... and CSS has been around long enuff that can do it in my sleep.... but fuuuuuuu now staring at Tumblr theme Customize box and literally feeling my brain shutting down.

[shinelikethunder]

To the anon: the amount of coding it takes to build your own Tumblr theme, AO3 skin, or rinkydink 90s-style webpage is ABSOLUTELY something you can learn by DIY exploration. HTML, roughly speaking the "noun" skeleton of a webpage's structure, is super beginner friendly. CSS, the "adjectives" side that controls color and size and spacing and lets you tweak the layout, is also pretty approachable, and it's really easy to go in and mess with the existing CSS styling of a page and see what happens.

This is true in general, tbh - you CAN learn by building things from scratch, but there's a really rich ecosystem of ways to view, live-edit, save modified copies, or run little custom overrides of existing page code.

"Actual coding" generally refers to the "verbs" side - imperative programming languages like JavaScript where you're telling the computer to Do Action X To Thing Y. That's got a bit of a steeper learning curve, but as mentioned, "fiddling with widgets that already exist on a webpage" tasks are one of the more approachable ways to get into it.

(JavaScript is the one that runs in your browser. Python, Ruby, Java, PHP, etc. need to be installed on your computer or a webserver, and are generally used to run more powerful - and more dangerous - apps that can fuck around with the filesystem and use a database and such. SQL is a smaller, specialized language for talking to databases.)

Ways to dive in and experiment:

You can literally write any crappy malformed HTML you want in a text editor like Notepad, save the file with a .html extension, and Right-click -> Open With to view it in your browser, which will make heroic efforts to turn it into a readable webpage.

Hit Ctrl+U on any webpage to view its raw source HTML. (May not be as helpful on sites like Tumblr that load a bunch of their contents on the fly through advanced JavaScript sorcery.)

On any page, sorcery-based or otherwise, Right-click -> Inspect Element or Ctrl+Shift+I will open up a fancy expandable view of the current contents and how the CSS styles are being applied to the HTML elements, and will let you get details on specific chunks and live-edit their styling. Any changes you make will show up temporarily and then vanish when you hit refresh or leave the page.

Once you're in that view, you can click over to the Console tab to type in whatever lines of JavaScript you feel like running to see what happens. Console will also show you any error messages the page has spat out.

On Tumblr, Edit Appearance -> Edit Theme -> Edit HTML will let you fuck with the HTML/CSS/JS of your blog theme, see a live preview, and save it when you're ready. You can make a sideblog for theme experimentation, pick anything from the theme garden, and modify it to your heart's content.

The Tampermonkey extension lets you write small bits of JavaScript called userscripts that run in the browser whenever you visit a particular site, and do whatever you want to the page contents.

Resources:

W3Schools is a good ol' standby for tutorials. Mozilla's documentation on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is fantastic when you want an exhaustive reference on everything a particular doohickey can do.

Search "Skin Tutorial" on AO3 for walkthroughs of things you can do with custom CSS, to the entire site or a single work. These are saved to your user account, not just the browser, so they'll also work across devices and on mobile when you're logged in.

Search "AO3" on GreasyFork.org to get an idea of what can be done with Tampermonkey scripts. You can also view the code of each one, and once you've installed someone else's script you can custom-edit it any way you want; the extension has a live editor.

Tumblr's custom theme documentation is a pretty good breakdown of the Tumblr-specific additions to vanilla HTML that let you insert blog data where you want it to go, and of the data that's available.

Neocities will let you build and host your own oldskool static webpages for free, and has an online HTML editor if you don't feel like uploading files.

Bonus: If you want a peek into what the guts of larger-scale "real" web apps look like, a lot of them have their code available on GitHub, including a bunch of fandom's faves:

The New XKit browser extension and its successor XKit Rewritten. The archive software that runs AO3. The heavily-modified old LiveJournal code that runs Dreamwidth. Tumblr doesn't publish much of its own in-house code but it does put out tools like an official Python library for third-party apps that want to talk directly to Tumblr's servers. And most self-hosted blog/forum/wiki software, including Wordpress and its entire ecosystem of plugins and themes, is open-source and can be examined and tinkered with at will.

However, please do NOT dive too deep if you're going to find this stuff intimidating compared to messing around with custom CSS in your blog theme. Because tbh, most personal DIY projects are gonna be more at the scale of custom themes and userscripts than giant platform software. I'm mostly linking to show that the opportunities to see how the sausage is made, crib from it, fuck around, and use modded versions of other people's code don't go away as you scale up into Srs Bsns Web Development. In fact, they tend to expand into opportunities to submit your own contributions to a project you love.

How difficult is learning how to code? I've seen a lot of discussion about how a lot of older fandom people are used to building their own sites and stuff and how younger people on the internet don't really know how to do that, so I've been thinking of getting into it...

--

Coding coding or html? 90s-style sites are really, really basic on a technical level. I learned in an afternoon from that girl's eye-searingly orange/pink tutorial site back in the day.

Actual coding comes in many levels of complexity. Learn a dab of python, and you can do things like automate downloading all the works in your AO3 history. Easier still is learning just enough to run other people's scripts.

One of the bigger issues with building sites/tools that people interact with is security. If you have anything other people are logging into and you suck at that, their passwords are going to get leaked. But if you're building a more static thing that doesn't store other people's data, that's a lot easier.

There are tons of free tutorials online for all sorts of tech things. Figure out what you're interested in and I'm sure you can find some.