i spent three days coding a dipped in ink replica and my computer didn’t burst into flames or give up its old life to join the ravkan volcra!!!!

lately i’ve been doing wild things like learning how to code and make the computer bend to my will and do my bidding for me.

i’ve officially termed it my second step to conquering the world after creating a loyal cat army that follows me everywhere i go and raids libraries to bring me back all the stories.

but you already know all of this.

(from that time two posts ago when we spent a considerable word count talking about html and c++ and fun things and me wanting to give up sleep and food and everything that the mortals do in order to take up coding and physics-ing and blogging as a full-time life and do nothing else for the rest of my immortal existence)

recently i tried dragging myself through youtube’s html courses.

but i’m an opinionated olive who takes great joy in complaining about html being too looooooong and wordy and so commonplace when compared with the sheer magic of python or c++.

i abandoned those tutorials after a mere hour, but apparently i’m unconvincing and ALSO take great joy in changing my mind so many times it’s actually annoying. because i returned and challenged the html deities to a war.

(SHH. I DRAMATICIZE. i was bored of coding calculators and for-loops and wanted to build exciting things so i put my foot down and said i’d do it even though i have heartbreakingly minimal programming knowledge and basically haven’t yet learned enough to do anything of consequence) (we call this #idiotism)

my first ever project, i decided late at night on the sixth of september when the rest of the world was asleep and dreaming, would be creating a completely original copy of the dipped in ink blog and i’d do it without any tutorial’s help.

it was the next morning that i gave up my life as a mortal and spent the next three days coding and planning and thinking and screaming obsessively.

in hindsight, it was all a weird mesh of constantly warring against my terrible memory and switching through google results searching for implementations of all the things i didn’t know how to do.

i had a pretty phenomenal time.

so this is me recounting it.

i spent some time cackling (for luck and because i like imagining i’m a witch sometimes) and then set to work opening up an online compiler and scouring my brain for every last detail of the one week of sleep-inducing html classes i’d taken way back in middle school (when i was a scrawny kid who liked reading library books through as many classes as she could get away with and had no interest in the workings of the outside world) (ALTHOUGH WHO AM I KIDDING I STILL DON’T)

after cursing myself for dozing through most of them (middle school computer science was very weird. everyone slept through like 3785% of the classes and you got very easily distracted even when you did manage to magically keep yourself awake and breathing), i did eventually get coding.

(but before that i typed through three different freecodecamp projects, WHICH ENORMOUSLY SAVED MY SKIN LATER) (and after that i screeched because IT WAS FUN)

all of this happened during the late morning of 7th september and by the time afternoon rolled around, i was ready to start experimenting and come out the other end with code documents that gave up their life midway.

aforementioned code compiler i was using at this point was the programiz html editor, which technically wasn’t the BEST option. for one, you can’t save anything on it (to solve this i decided that at the end of each coding session i’d copy-paste everything i’d written so far into seperate notepads) (i’m not THAT dumb, gregory) but it also meant that if the computer spontaneously decided to stop working / switch itself off / close all my tabs / update chrome / reload the page, i’d lose everything i’d done so far and have to start again from scratch.

my only other available option was replit, but replit’s ugly and i hate it. so we risked it.

this worked for about an hour until i uploaded graphics and then it kind of just,,,, wouldn’t let me type anymore. cue anoushka spending the next half hour trying to reload pages and copy-pasting stuff about 746384 times in various opened tabs BUT THE FILES SLOWED DOWN AND I STILL COULDN’T TYPE ANYTHING AND MY COMPUTER REFUSED TO COOPERATE.

this was when i gave up and resigned myself to my sad sad fate of using the replit environment with it’s annoying interface and ugly colors.

at this point, i’d gotten the home page partially completed and the post display working, and it looked something like this:

admittedly not the best (THE FORMATTING WAS HORRENDOUS) (and i still hadn’t figured out how to align photos despite my multiple attempts so everything pretty much sucked)

an exhaustive list of my 7th september problems:

• the menu buttons were ALL OVER THE PLACE. and they wouldn’t stay in the right-hand-side corner of the screen the way i wanted them to. REBELLIOUS BEASTS.
• i got mad and screamed a little.
• i’d managed to get the text blocks to take up residence directly below each other but the images refused when i tried to get them to align themselves too.
• this led to some more screaming.
• after that i decided that everything was TOO BROAD AND WOULD HAVE TO BE SHRUNK. but google and my mom joined forces and vehemently disagreed when i suggested doing it the washing machine way. after exhausting through every single threat, method of blackmail, begging tactic and all other human forms of conviction possible, i resigned myself to the fate of having to shrink things through code.
• after that there were screams.
• and the realization that the posts page sucked because i still hadn’t properly styled it. or anything. which was sad.

but i could get the menu options to magically shrink when i hovered my cursor over them, which was kind of cool. so i treated myself to cake and mulled over everything that went wrong and came up with ways i could try to fix things. tomorrow.

after that, the unanimous decision was made to copy all the text from my three most recent blog posts into seperate html pages and link them together. except that was ridiculously tedious so i gave up again and called it a day.

and that’s how the seventh of september ended.

total time spent programming: 3 hours 30 minutes

today’s first realization: my code had followed lead of the navigation menu and was all over the place too. which made it an absolute pain to read through. (HOW SAD)

after spending a considerable amount of time seperating lines and sections and tags and my opinions and adding comments everywhere, it still looked like trash.

like the rest of the very intelligent human population, i blamed it all on replit and decided to move on.

the day’s first order of business was to format the posts page until it looked mildly decent and didn’t have me screeching every time i looked at it. so that was where we started.

i figured out how adding side margins to the entire body could solve the everything-is-too-broad problem. i realized how getting the continue reading blocks to go all large when you hovered over them could make everything look cool. i went to feed my cats as celebration and got distracted by a new kitten who kept meowing under the neighbour’s car and wouldn’t stop. i banned nijo from battling her.

after that, i spent an hour trying to highlight the lower half of the navigation menu text, at which i failed phenomenally (see below. or don’t) IT KEPT STRETCHING ALL THE WAY DOWN AND WOULDN’T LISTEN.

the olivish ramblings / posts page still looked ugly, i couldn’t gather the courage to copy paste text into the about page, and when i tried shrinking the too-broad home page, it messed with the alignment i’d spent HOURS perfecting.

i tinkered around for a little longer and messed around with the posts page some more and eventually the day ended and i resigned myself to schoolwork.

my current future plans went like this:

• the first thing i’d do tomorrow was research an html compiler that saved things and wasn’t an absolute pain that took five minutes to load each time i wanted to look at changes i’d made on a page. (at this point i was constantly tweaking values and smol things everywhere and waiting for the pages to load after changing a single word was just a magnanimous waste of time)
• then i’d manually retype code and try shortening everything because scrolling through these messes everytime i wanted to look up class names made me want to burst out in tears and scream until the world shattered and dissolved itself in water.
• and like,,, i wouldn’t want to go down in history as the girl who destroyed the world through sobs.
• eh on second thought maybe if the world dissolved, we wouldn’t have anyone to write that history.
• (but i refuse to risk it)

total time spent programming: 4 hours 40 minutes

on the ninth of september, i conquered the world.

kind of.

• i figured out how to use the visual studio code editor and based on how easy it turned out to be, i’m firmly convinced that those 643838 youtube instruction videos i watched on installation and set-up were what actually led me awry.
• i also rewrote all the code and everything looks NICE now and the font is so perfect and the size is the exact right amount of big and OHMYGOSH I LOVE VISUAL STUDIO.
• i ate the last cake slice so i’m currently out.
• BUT THE TEXT INSIDE THE POSTS IS SPACED PROPERLY NOW AND DOESN’T LOOK LIKE IT’S STUCK IN A NASTY TRAFFIC JAM. i’m very proud about figuring out how to play traffic police the right way.
• OH AND I COMPLETED CODING THE ENTIRE THING.

it wasn’t as annoyingly impossible as i’d initially convinced myself it would be which is a surprise (BUT DON’T LET THAT FOOL YOU. the aligning-everything part is still a method for torture. although a slightly not-entirely-terrible one)

the finish-line faults:

(this is basically a smol list of all the things i could still improve on and plan on fixing someday) (BUT THAT DAY ISN’T TODAY)

• i want to add a side bar on the left that opens and closes when you click on it and i even researched how you could do this but most of what i found said you had to use javascript for it and i know zero javascript so like,,, another day.
• i maybe also someday want to make the individual posts look less. WHITE. because they look so white right now.
• and figure out how to implement the now-working half-text-highlight thing on the real blog BECAUSE I’M A FAN. (half-highlights look so PRETTY okay)
• and possibly change up the pictures on the homepage because everything except the first row looks entirely mis-matched?? #SENDHELP.
• ALSO SOMEONE FIX THE ABOUT PAGE FOR ME, THANKS.
• i want to learn how to code more complex things because GOSH i have so many ideas and no clue how to do any of it. which slightly sucks. BUT I SHALL PERSEVERE. (because one day i want to rule the world)
• (look i have this smol little big dream of people opening the site and being bombarded with a chat box that screams out taylor swift lyrics at random and makes everyone jump out of their chairs in surprise. and a robot-like animation with a head that rotates all of 360 degrees, who walks around the screen and wonders out loud about philosohical questions when it’s bored)

THE FUTURE SOUNDS LIKE SUCH A FUN PLACE RIGHT NOW.

total time spent programming: 6 hours 30 minutes

i think we can all agree that my first-ever programming project was a success. although maybe a smol one. (everything that’s currently on it was done manually (which makes it unexciting). i basically just designed stuff and screamed and tweaked code and ate cake and then screamed some more) BUT OHMYGOSH I DID IT. it’s slightly wild because anoushka of a year ago would much rather have run into the woods screaming and agreed to live out the rest of her life under a rock than face something that looked so scary and unconquerable and destined to bring shame upon her position as queen of the dragons.

BUT I DID IT. i conquered code!!!!! and it was fun!!!!

tell me about YOUR coding adventures? PLEASE? and also whether your computer ever stabbed you in the back and ran away to join the volcra even when you begged it to take you too? ALL THE SECRETS.