For tutorials and similar things. Will hopefully expand with time. Reverse chronological order!
What's in a good site?
2025-09-19
A week ago I wrote an article on things I think people should avoid if they want to create and share websites, Hyper Text Muck-up Language. But what should you do, then, if all of those things aren't ideal? What's in a good site?
My number one answer is passion. Passion for whatever you're sharing and passion for working on the site itself. Of course, that's a little vague; it's like saying if you want to write a book, you need something to write about; sure it's true, but it doesn't help the advice-seeker, does it? All it does is cause frustration!
So, I'd like to filter through what "passion" actually means, and what it might result in. It's easier to know what you are capable of when the options are distilled to their simplest forms.
HTML is a wonderful language. It's simple, universal, renders on almost any device, and best of all when you combine it with CSS you can manipulate it to create diverse and beautful websites. A website can be elegantly simple or it can be deliciously dense and this versatility is a quality I really enjoy.
The thing is that thanks to that versatility allowing all sorts of website layouts—and thanks to the simplicity of the language allowing absolutely anybody to make a website—there are a lot of bad practices being passed around and reinvented, especially in hobbyist circles.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Newbies will always make mistakes when learning a new hobby or skill, and even I carry certain bad practices by my side no matter what! If you are a hobbyist learning for the first time, you're bound to make a few mistakes, or you'll see other people doing something and think you should do it too. This is especially the case in the website-making hobby, where many people want to invoke or recreate old websites from the 90s or 00s.
However, there are some things I see a lot, and I'd like to speak on them!
Here's a fun problem I came across some time ago, while designing my site cattle mutilation: I wanted to distinguish out-links from in-links visually... without manually adding a new class to all my out-links... without any nasty JavaScript involved. There was always the option of just using JS, linking a little script in the header of all my pages and calling it a day, but I was steadfast on the aesthetics being immediate and without such bloat.
So, intent on doing everything I could to make this happen, I took to Google. I asked it: How do you make an outlink styled differently? That didn't lead to much that was relevant. Eventually, I discovered something wonderful which I didn't know I was already using: CSS pseudo-classes. Furthermore, I discovered a new type of selector to go with class and ID selectors, the humble attribute selector.
Angura Kei is a term that gets thrown around a lot. Some people claim it's a very real thing, some people claim it's an entirely made up thing, and nobody can decide whether it's separate from eroguro-kei or not. As an Angura Kei expert[citation needed] (delusional fanatic) I think I am qualified not only to settle the matter but to teach all of my adoring fans how to truly become Angura Kei.
To become Angura Kei, you need to dress the part like all good fans do. In fact, dressing the part is perhaps the most important part of the whole affair. You can throw the bands out entirely as long as you claim to listen to SEX-ANDROID. Of course, Angura Kei bands dress all sorts of ways, but to be Angura you should do shironuri (paint yourself white). How will we know you come from that angura (mutilation of "underground") Kabuki-theatre Visual Kei scene?
Please ignore the several bandmen who show up on stage with their own skin tone and the Angura bandmen with little or even no makeup. You will do your white make and you will be happy.
Tip: if you're new to being a poser, try listening to the band you'll pretend to be into exactly once so that you can claim to have a favourite song.
So, let's give you a shironuri tutorial, photos and all. I'll teach you how to turn yourself from a barefaced wreck into a true bandman doppelganger, because you probably saw a Muchi Muchi Anago cosplayer on Pinterest labeled "Gloomy bear girl" and used that photo for your pinned Tweet while not knowing shit about Hachiyama Yuumi.
My shironuri process is very simple and very quick. I can get my makeup done in less than ten minutes and I barely need a mirror. That is because my makeup is generally awful, but why wouldn't it be?