About this site

If you right click on any image and select “open image” you will see it in full resolution. No “click to zoom” lightbox to avoid JavaScript.

This page is about the purpose of this webstie. It’s the easiest for me to tell about it in a chronological way.

“Welcome” arc

The first version was a simple landing page that was supposed to mimic the “Welcome to Windows 98” prorgam that launched automatically after installing Windows 98. Fueled by fascination with vaporwave, I wanted to see how much I can force my way through with completely hand-written html and css. Well, except the base style which was the amazing 98.css. You can still see it here! (it uses some JavaScript)

First version of mary.moe

But I had some ambition, so…

WordPress arc

In October 2021 this site has been rebuilt on WordPress - to be everything at once. It stayed like that until October 2023 (I am surprised too!).

WordPress version of mary.moe

It served as my place that I could direct people I know IRL to when they ask “oh, you do photography, where can I see your photos?” or “where can I see your little projects?”. To get it to look like Windows 98, I once again borrowed a lot from 98.css and added way too much “Additional CSS” than any law should allow. This time overriding the color scheme to follow 98’s “Storm (VGA)” theme (and Rose for a moment). This was a hassle to maintain and was prone to breaking should anything get updated. I dreamed of making this site more lightweight, simple, readable, less overloaded with everything as soon as I finished adding content to the WordPress one, basically a static site, so…

Now

We are now here. This iteration is a nod to the old and clunky web design of the early 2000s. Both in the way it’s made (simple static html, largery by hand) and in its purpose. It will contain mostly text-based content that is just fun for me to write (unlike adding another album of photos that for some reason either don’t convert properly, don’t scale well on the front-end or are just boring…). Photo galleries will move somewhere else - either just Instagram or I’ll host Pixelfed or something.

Anyway, I’ve made this one with 7.css as base, hand-crafting the layout and overriding some things from 7.css here and there - adding icons, making the content section more readable. Of course the border color (#800080) comes from Storm (VGA) theme again ^^

Also, this one should be viewable at any resolution from 1280x800 up. (x768 should work too, just remember to go into full screen).

To keep at least a little bit of sanity, I use Hugo, a static site generator, to fill the base page and its sections with content and control some of its functions (URIs, some styling, resources).

And of course, as some content is brought over from other places it will be dated with the actual date of publishing, not the date it appeared here. Basically, everything dated before October 2023 should be treated this way.

That’s all! For now at least. If anything meaningful and worth mentioning changes, I’ll probably update this page.