This is the self indulgent section!

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Hi, I'm BoostandEthanol.

I have thirty-seven hobbies all dressed up in a car shaped trenchcoat, and I wish I came up with that line myself. Everything I do somehow links back to cars. From gaming, coding, writing, my engineering degree, the YouTube channel, and even this website's origins stem from having somewhere to dump links to stuff about cars. Expect a common thread across this site.

To reiterate, even if you don't explictly see a car connection, assume there is somehow one buried beneath.

Despite that, I'm currently a slightly lost soul. Cars haven't exactly given me the best experience in reality, and after graduating I'm sort of trying to find direction in my life, figuring out if I should (or if I even could) ditch two-decades of passion for something else, and if I'm doomed to a life trapped in a profession I have no care or passion for.

But that's depressing and probably not representative of me... Onwards!

I wear a hoodie and headphones everywhere I go, have a 1900 song long Spotify playlist of every song I like enough to hit shuffle and forget.

My favourite hobbies:

• 3D Printing
• Listening to Music
• Writing
• Gaming
• Making Spreadsheets (yes, really)
• Watching Motorsports

The favelist:

• Trackmania environment? Coast
• Song? People Pleaser by Yet to Bloom
• Game? Heat Signature

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This was a phrase once used out of a level of irony. It rolled off the tongue reasonably well, and self-shilling felt a lot less intrusive when it wasn't used sincerely, twisted into a punchline where I was an egomaniac obssessed with my own creations. Since then, after hearing other people use similar catchphrases for their own content, it became slightly uncomfortable and irritating. So now if it's used, it's something akin to lorem ipsum, a slightly personalised version of a generic placeholder text when nothing original is worth coming up with.

Hey, I want to make something like this!

Really? Get your head checked.

TL;DR:

• Site Creation Date: 2024-08-13
• Buttons: Take what you want. Some are mine, some are stolen. That's how it goes.
• Everything else: Take what you want, but please figure out a way to easily let people find me if they want to.
• Fonts:
  • Mecha Bold is the square awkward one.
  • Atkinson Hyperlegible is for anything I care about you reading.
• Static Site Generator: 11ty V3.0.0
  • All pages are written in markdown.
  • No JavaScript as of writing.
• Site should be mildly mobile friendly. Hardly optimised, but definitely useable.

Now the long version:

This site was made on the 13th of August, 2024, and hosted on Neocities. The layout and the css is all my own work. Initially, I was going to handwrite the entire site. That fell apart because of the sheer, menial, repetitive effort required just to add a new button on the few pages this site contained at the time. It's not just about the energy to go through each page, but also the consistency when making a change. It's easy to make a mistake and have to go through page by page, especially my horrendous file structure organisation and the fact I'm a total novice at this.

So now this site is being developed using the Static Site Generator 11ty. Which was surprisingly difficult to get into. It seems like there's no real baby's first SGS. None of them frontload with why you'd care about using the product, instead telling you how many milliseconds it takes to install/download/run the software to differentiate from others. ChatGPT gave me a list, 11ty had a very nice onboarding tutorial so I stuck out with that, and then I suffered through their horrendously weak documentation.

Here's the summary I wish I had:

A Static Site Generator is a bit of software to write some HTML once, hit a button, and apply that to a bunch of pages, auto-formatting links, etc. They're on the less formal side of computer stuff, so you work with the terminal to tell the SGS to run, and I just use good ol' friendly VSCode to write my code up.

Any buttons you see are either stolen (like the Dr Pepper one) or made personally using GIMP 2.10.14.

For both learning and documentation, I'm showing how this site is (broadly) built here. Posts are written as .md (markdown) files, and then converted into HTML using the static site generator 11ty. 11ty is a horridly documented software, and I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am without the help of ChatGPT.

At the top of each .md file is a bit of code written in YAML. I'm not sure why 11ty's default is to bounce around between 4 different languages, but there we go...

Here's broadly how a page is set up for me:

---
layout: Load in the filepath for the html/css I've designed for this site.
title: What would I like this page to be called?
tags:
- I use these to link pages together. For example, this page is tagged 'About' to tell it to show up in the menu on the previous page
keywords:
- Tag the page with some keywords for probably SEO purposes. idk. Seems like good form to include them. If left empty, will default to title.
icon: Filepath for the icon, which I use for silly things like the 404 page. Defaults to the standard BaE logo otherwise.
---

Markdown pretty much instantly became my preferred way to write posts. It's effectively got everything you could ever want from a word processor for writing general purpose posts, but instead of having to hunt down for those specific functions. Just tag the text, with very efficient single character codes, and it all converts naturally. Same as using Discord.

Other stuff about 11ty:

11ty has a way to load in sections of HTML wherever you want, called _partials. Typically these are written in a language called Liquid, or Nunjucks, which are both mildly poorly documented languages that I'm relatively sure are built off of JavaScript in some capacity. This site uses Nunjucks. With a "don't repeat yourself attitude," _partials have been used where easy and obvious. The header buttons are created by tagging pages "Header Button" to add them up there. All the metadata can be automatically called in. The breadcrumbs had to be added like that, or else go through the entire website, page by page, tracing out the steps a user would make.

Basically any noteable section that would change depending on the need for the page, gets automated in some way. Which really appeals to me. To be fair, it's not so much smart development on my end as much as the only way to work within the layout I've designed.

Other site development notes:

The fonts have "private" added onto the end of their names in the CSS. This is to avoid a case of "it works on my machine," which is really easy to do with fonts. Changing the name means the system doesn't recognise them, so the files actually have to have transferred across.

I have heavily abused the grid system to shape this, which involves telling CSS sections that they have to display in a grid format. I'm sure I've gone overkill in places, so if you go poking about inspect element, expect there to be some glaringly obvious cleanup jobs.

The site is optimised around a line width of 800px, which shrinks a little when the text is long enough to add a scroll bar, but that minor inconsistency hardly irks me. I'm not sure where 800px came from, but it seems to work reasonably well on the screens I use. The site itself is offset 128px to the left, so the content is centred and that sidebar will touch the side of the screen if you narrow your window. That is, unless you're on a screen narrower than 1105px, where the layout changes. That's as easy as adding a media query and then rewriting the CSS. Which in itself is easy, because the grid system means I can just tell the sections I've made to move and fill different containers.

I'm still torn about the link colours. The blue/purple is ugly, but makes it clear exactly what they're for. I might experiment with a less jarring colour scheme.

Need to adjust the writeup now I know how to note the json data method thing

Here's that post about hacking about using the _data folder:

https://github.com/11ty/eleventy/issues/380#issuecomment-568033456

ChatGPT sure loves building custom filters for every little idea or partial

The following is best appreciated when read elevated by a soapbox

This is a weirdly loaded question.

Warning: the following piece is best understood by asking someone to stand on a soapbox and read it to you.

This site is intended to showoff projects, share resources, and generally be a personal place to make things, distanced from comment sections and judgement.

Getting myself a website I liked is akin to the blue Mini in The Italian Job. It took a few runs at the ramps on the bus, but now it's up there after a few failed attempts using WordPress and an increasingly strained analogy. The free, easy access version of WP is fine if you're interested in content. If you've got a vision of words to write and share with no further concerns, just use one of those free sitebuilders that give you boxes to type and a button to make the text go bold.

Unfortunately for the part of me that wishes I was a pure productivity machine, I have far too much pride in the process of getting something out there. Wordpress was asphixiating in how tightly it restricted me. Simply picking a colour scheme that didn't clash, holding the right hex codes, placing menus and ordering them in a way I wanted, or sorting out the posts or moving them under a different heading, was far too much effort.

This whole, handcrafted html experience, is far easier for me to wrap my head around. There's a simple list of file structures and a way to engineer around problems. You can't box me within UI constraints or a premium plan when I can tell the site to look and say everything I want it to. If something doesn't look or feel right, I can move it.

Besides the whole, "I want my site to be its own special snowflake" angle, Wordpress would try and be too smart for its own good. I think if you look at my site now, it's grey text on a white background because... I guess it felt that I needed a light mode?

This is my place to exist online. Away from the algorithms, in a place where everyone is here to express themselves, be damned if there's an audience. I think this has been a long time coming.

The seed that's finally sprouted into producing this webpage started about a year-and-a-half ago. "Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era" was my first subtle nudge and reminder that the way I was using the internet wasn't right. Reddit was my timesink of choice, so replace the TikTok Subway Surfers videos for endless cat Subreddits or r/Formula1 posts that didn't really add anything of value. Twitter was a similar story of endless scrolling, and little to no net benefit. Arguably the worst was YouTube, where I'd desperately hunt for noise in lieu of thoughts. After watching the video, I uninstalled the apps, and attempted to relagate them to an occasional peek on safari. This worked for Reddit, where I still haven't used for more than the occasional question, but the other two still have reasonably good mobile browser experiences and keep pulling me back.

More recently, the videos that I suppose gave me the final spur forward were "The Importance of Real Things" and "Death of the Follower & the Future of Creativity on the Web" that reminded me how strange it was that anything and everything I made was effectively stranded on someone else's server, being promoted by a mysterious algorithm responsible for so many trends I hate. I use Google Docs for everything, the day Spotify goes down is the day that I forget 1900 songs, my videos are so throwaway that I don't have copies of most of them anymore, all my closest friendships are reliant on Discord keeping their lights on, and my Tweets and Reddit posts, no matter how minor and insignificant, aren't kept close to me. There's a fine line between hoarding and preservation. I do think tweets should be throwaway, I don't think every comment needs to be kept and saved.

Let's not get conflated with me hating every single large service. There's a reason they thrive, there's a reason we all still use them. I'm not going to stop. But I want a place of my own. Where all my pages are backed up on my own harddrive, where I'm not trying to hold my position in a rushing rapids of the algorithm. And somewhere that's hands on, freeform, experimental, and permenant.

Most recently, I've gotten into extensions to make the internet less addictive. Chrome extensions unhooked for YouTube and Twitch work a treat, and on iOS £3 got me a safari extension to do the same thing in my browser. Together they've really got me less distracted, or at least more exploratory. I'm watching more than I'm scrolling, it feels at least.

PC:

• Ryzen 5 3600
• 1050Ti
• 16GB DDR4
• Not enough storage (128GB SSD boot drive, 1TB 2x HDD internal, 2TB HDD external)
• Some LG TV and Acer monitor that are horribly uncolourmatched and also like, 1080p

Software:

• GIMP 2.10.14
• Chrome running DuckDuckGo
• 11ty 3.0.0