A Whole New Look

2026-05-11

A Brand New Look

It's been 6 months to the day since the last time I made a post, and I figured it's time to put the website to good use. I spend roughly $27.84 a year for both a domain and a VPS after all (although I am considering switching to self-hosting the site with the rest of my homelab), so might as well put it to good use. Now you might notice that the website has a fresh new look. Don't lie to me, I know I am the only one who looks at this site consistnetly so I'll provide screenshots later down for the rest of the nerds. But first, allow me to go on a brief rant.

WordPress is okay and all, it does what it needs to do. However, it was too much for what I wanted. From plugins, Russian comment spam, the same white minimal theme remade 100 different ways, and databases, it was just too much. From the start, I had to disable settings such as "xmlrpc" to make it more secure against automated bots designed to attack the protocol used in the phone app, and it is too bulky for my needs. I host a small blog, and combined with the database, it uses about 291 mb of ram at idle. Of course this is small stuff and in this day and age isn't much of a hinderance. But running the website now on nginx it uses about 4 mb of ram for a 194.576% difference! Again, this doesn't really mean anything, but I just like to think that just because we have the computing power doesn't mean we have to use every drop of it. My best comparison is thinking Left 4 Dead 2 has amazing graphics and has an install size of about 15 gb whereas the latest Call of Duty has an install size of about 214 GB. I don't need to be able to see each individual pore on my character's hands while my PC produces digital screams of agony.

So what did I use instead? I went with Zola. I started off a bit insane with the idea that I would just use a web server and hand-craft each HTML page, as I just wanted something simple. Thankfully, I realized how bad of an idea that was before ever trying to start it, so instead I took a look at some static site generators. I had seen a lot that would take markdown files and just add it to a black or white background, and somehow that ruined the idea of markdown files being used to create the pages, so I looked elsewhere. Originally, I heavily considered mkws.sh as it was just C/Bash and writing a program to convert my own markdown files to HTML. But mkws.sh was pretty short-lived as I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. But, as of writing, I understand the issue was beliving that static site generators also came bundled with a web server when in fact, most do not. Following that ordeal, I checked out some more popular ones like Hugo, 11ty, and Jekyll but they all seemed rather complicated to me. Although I must admit that I didn’t try very hard to understand it. Soon enough, I stumbled onto Zola. Now, I don’t actually know the thought process I had of disliking markdown, to using it anyway, because mine would somehow be cooler, to just using markdown with Zola anyhow. Call that the circle of life.

Writing My Own HTML

I've always had a soft spot for handmade websites, especially the ones that look like they haven't been updated since 2000, but I was really inspired to make my own after checking out some cool Neocities pages (seriously, stop reading and check them out). Now my site looks nothing like the ones I like and is maybe more akin to the blank page site generators I complained about. But after writing a lot of HTML myself (and a lot of copy and paste from W3Schools) this site looks amazing to me.

I started with the blue and green colors from the old design of the website. The background was solid green, and I figured out how to add bars on either side as well as a rounded blue box for all the content. It was a fairly simple process to build the site with Zola, although I found the docs to be a bit harder to understand at times, which was probably more of a me thing. The hardest part was trying to search for help, not on the offical website, as I didn't find a lot of people discussing it on places like YouTube or Reddit. It was also annoying to try searching for "Zola how to do X" and getting search results for a wedding planner with the same name. But after a lot of strained eyes and thankfully no tears, I was able to make a base layout and remove my hardcoded HTML home page, and made it able to change with a markdown file instead.

I also spiced things up by going from a single sidebar on the left to having a sidebar on both sides. Also going for dotted lines for the sidebars and a thicker, rounded border to give a more "cartoony" look, which I am, in fact, a sucker for. To also give more life to the page, I opted to create a seamless pattern for the background with some icons that I think reflected some things from my life. I won't go over all of them, but we got Tux (the Linux penguin) for my enjoyment of Linux, a serif font letter "A" for my love of fonts (although I actually enjoy sans-serif fonts better), a book for reading, and lastly a floppy disk because I like old technology and because I genuinely have a floppy disk tattooed on me.

My absolute favorite bit is the scrolling text at the bottom. It uses the marquee tag, one that has been considered deprecated and "do not use" for over a decade now, but it works, and I don't want to touch CSS again. But its not just the fact that it scrolls, but rather I made a script to change it daily. As of writing, there are only 25 quotes ranging from things I say, lines from books, and song lyrics because I am original and, according to the legal system, not like the other girls.

Here are some examples:

Don't you have somewhere to be at 7:30?
Rebooting soon as I am able
That's a lot to live up to
See you space cowboy
Oh, now look at all the other flies. Spread apart, almost out of sight. Spider, you've got quite the appetite

A big part of designing, however, was creating and editing CSS. I know I complained about it a few times, but it really wasn't that bad. The hardest part was making everything work on mobile, such as hiding elements and creating a top nav bar when the screen is phone-sized. As with most things, once you know how to do it, it really isn't that bad. But doing CSS starting fresh caused a lot of headaches. Also took me a while to get the Next Sunday to work because of folder structures and the fact that I have it installed as a system font on just about every system that I have that also supports custom font installations, making it appear to be working when it was in fact not.

Docker & Problems I Had

Once the site was made I had a plethora of issues trying to get it to work with docker and honestly, I shouldn't be using docker for my web hosting. Docker has plenty of uses on my homelab but this is not one of them. The only reason I do so is for automatic ssl certs and reverse proxy with caddy-docker-proxy and Pterodactyl. It would be a lot of work now to ditch docker and get everything working, especially with pterodactyl (for the Minecraft server), so until the minecraft server sees the end of its days or I decide to self-host the website on an e-waste chromebook, docker it is.

The main problems were the documentation pages regarding Zola and not understanding a web server comes separate. For the documentation it starts with just single commands with no docker-compose, to a Dockerfile (which isn't a docker compose), to a different Dockerfile on a different page in the documentation. I was able to get a docker compose running and upon reflection, it was confusion on my part for all the issues with docker. In fact, in the end I lied. I am not using docker for Zola but I am using it to serve the site with nginx.

When creating the site locally, it is served directly from the Zola program on localhost and would detect changes and build automatically. Once I tried to get the site in docker form I could not manage to get Zola to serve it (I think I could now but it wouldn't be worth it) or detect any changes. Eventaully I realized the serving issue was from a lack of a webserver. The Zola Dockerfile on the installation page is:

FROM ghcr.io/getzola/zola:v0.22.1 AS zola

COPY . /project
WORKDIR /project
RUN ["zola", "build"]

Which just builds the website to a folder structure readable for a web server. It wasn't until I went to the Docker page of the documentation that I found:

FROM ghcr.io/getzola/zola:v0.22.1 AS zola

COPY . /project
WORKDIR /project
RUN ["zola", "build"]

FROM ghcr.io/static-web-server/static-web-server:2
WORKDIR /
COPY --from=zola /project/public /public

Once the website was being served, I quickly realized that I couldn't have it rebuild on changes automatically like I had been doing when testing it on my own machine. I thought it was a bug, but as I have repeated several times, I just didn't understand. The program creates a website not host it.

Once that had been established, it was time for my fun changing quote of the day. I wrote a script to change it daily, but soon found that the webserver wouldn't detect my changes. I understand now its because it would copy the website folder to the Docker webserver folder on starting the container, but I couldn't find the location of the web server to change it there, causing me to have to restart the web server any times I wanted to make changes. Now the site would only be down for about 5 seconds a day, but that would be against the spirit of a website and, more importantly, I didn't want to have to run a script as sudo/root to reboot a container daily.

Ditching the Dockerfile, I decided to just use Caddy to serve the website as I was already using it. However, due to me using a different version compared to the standard caddy, I just couldn't figure it out, and now run nginx routed through caddy. Which is a bit wild as they both accomplish similar things, but after a whole lot of hours trying, it works and thats good enough for me. I also realized it was pointless detecting for changes if I already have to upload the markdown files manually. So I just upload and have a bash alias to rebuild and copy to the nginx folder.

Missing Players List & Graveyard

Now with the new website changes, I have not brought over the player list or graveyard. These were some of the main selling points for the hardcore server, but it broke down only a few months in, around December 2025. I don't remember what the cause of the problem was, but I made a bandaid solution to prevent Quartzguard from crashing and then exasberated the problem by trying to make custom WordPress endpoints like I had discussed in the Quartzguard code discussion.

Updating the player list and graveyard relied primarily on my Discord bot, but with the recent ID verification events, I have no plan of fixing it or using Discord. The bot and server still run, but since I no longer use Discord, it will not be fixed. I know in my heart of hearts I can get it working again on the new site and without Discord, just not at the speed it used to do. The site used to update within seconds of someone dying/joining, and while I could hack together a solution to be similar, it would be too many moving parts. I do plan on updating the list and graveyard eventually, but at this time, I frankly just don't want to, as I haven't played on the server in many months due to moving back to my home country (unfortunately) and starting college as a full time student. (I finished my first semester and dropped one course, so I guess I was only a 3/4th time student)

Screenshots of the Old Site

Congrats you made it or skipped to the end! Enjoy screenshots of what the old site used to look like and pretend you have FOMO.