9 year retrospective [image heavy]
2026-02-08
On February 9 2017, I made my Neocities account. Since then, I have left Neocities, came back to Neocities, and left again. I amassed over 300k views and about 130 followers while I was there, and honestly I don't think I did too bad before I stopped updating over there probably 3-ish years ago.
To be honest, I don't even remember how I originally discovered Neocities. I think it was probably through a random Tumblr post or something? Originally I was just using it for my "about" page for Tumblr and Twitter (in lieu of twpf/Listography/Carrd/whatever was popular at the time), but over time I started trying to make a real site.
Regardless, here I am today, still around in another place, in another time. This is a look back on all the stuff I've done with my site over the past few years (9 years still counts as only a few, right...?). If I was a more sociable person maybe I'd have some stories to tell, but tbh I've generally kept to myself over the years and haven't had any friends in the indie web scene, so really all I have to share is my journey through garbage layouts.
This isn't an exhaustive list of everything I've done -- a lot of it has been lost to time, but it's fun to look back on what I have access to still. I've technically had multiple sites over the years, but considering they've all now merged into the same thing I consider them all to be one and the same project.
Before I begin
Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post, "Musings on social media" -- I didn't really think anyone would actually read it from the Nekoweb feed LOL, much less comment and respond to it. I also didn't really intend for it to be real meta criticism; I didn't really even consider it could/would possibly be taken that way at all until I saw wulf mention:
I don't believe Nyar's comments on visit counters and webring buttons were directed at anyone in particular (nor meant in animosity)
(Did someone say Animosity??)
And it made me realise, oh shit, are people going to take my post personally? I mean, obviously someone will, because I literally made the opening statement (that I also used for the feed description) a bold ass statement that probably came off as condescending. I'm not going to change it, though LOL
To be honest, I don't really judge anyone who flaunts a view count or number of followers -- view counters in particular have been around for ages now. And I can't pretend that I don't care about numbers, either. I had 300k views on Neocities, and here on Nekoweb I just reached 1000 -- I do miss having a "reach" and feeling like people were interested in what I said or did, and I think that's common for people. I have friends who only like posting on social media sites where they think people are going to interact with them, and they don't want to just post into the void with 0 likes or replies. So it goes, though, and regardless of whether 1 person is watching or 1000 are, I'm going to keep doing what I want.
Anyway, enough of that! Let's begin~
Era of siralos (2017-2019)
I was in the Funamusea fandom when I originally made my account, so my initial site was named Siralos after my favourite character. Originally I was just editing Tumblr page themes (back when people still used those and before Tumblr forced its shitty generic themes as much as possible), but pretty quickly I took to trying to make my own ones.
Of the edited layouts I used, this is the only one I still have a copy of, probably because it was the most interesting and I still like it tbh:
(This layout is credited to bitter-smile on Tumblr, but there appears to be nothing on that blog anymore, so idk if they perhaps just deleted everything or remade/renamed to something else)
From there, I ended up trying my hand at my own layouts:
(I was thinking of putting the code up for the Neopets one at some point, but tbh it's kinda uninteresting and not a 1:1 recreation of the Neopets userlookups, anyway.)
I feel like I kinda had my ideal design style figured out pretty early on tbh, with the colour scheme and the rounded borders. The black/grey/orange colouration was a long time staple of my layouts, and I really only recently departed from using it in probably the past year or so when I redid my site into the white/pink/purple layout I have now.
Eventually, I started trying my hand at real site layouts too. They were... terrible, to say the least. My first attempts were quite boring and along the lines of this:
But as I started to use Neocities more and more, I discovered a certain... trend. A trend of intentionally ugly layouts, 1000 GIFs, and being as loud and obnoxious as possible for the hell of it. If you've ever read Mariteaux's articles on "nostalgiamining," you probably know what I'm talking about -- I was a victim of this trend as well.
Enter probably the worst design I ever fucking made (the second version of it is slightly less awful):
What the fuck was I thinking bro ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜
This did not last long at least. Eventually the shitty "ironic" layout was kept to the splash page:
While my site started to take on a slightly less awful design:
However, it was still not good. I honestly never achieved anything I was proud of in this iteration, aside from some of the "about" pages that I really liked.
feargarden.xyz and my original blog (2018-2021)
Parallel to my original siralos saga, I must've gotten a supporter account at some point because I had a second Neocities site, feargarden. It was similarly uninteresting like siralos, and tbh I don't know why I even had it. To try out other layouts maybe?
Initially, it was like this (making use once again of the black/grey/orange colours):
Sometime after this, I bought my first VPS and first ever domain -- feargarden.xyz, because xyz is cheap as hell (and also often flagged as spam due to how cheap and abused it is, yay!). feargarden very quickly moved off Neocities and became a "real site" for me, where I started testing out making layouts with PHP instead of just HTML.
I think there were probably some minor iterations to these that were lost over time, but the second version there is really how I picture the original layout the most in my head.
Admittedly, I did not have much on this site that wasn't already something on siralos. However, there was one exception to this: my original site blog. My blog was the part I used the most, though not for traditional blogging lol. It was once again also a PHP test zone, but I used it the most for venting into the fuckin void.
Because this site wasn't on Neocities, discoverability was nearly nonexistent for me, so I could really just post whatever the hell I wanted without worrying about anyone seeing it. By 2021 I think I had made almost 100 posts, on topics a beautiful array of topics such as:
- Site updates (infrequent)
- Me trying out new software (occasional)
- Being depressed (extremely common)
- Being suicidal (also very common)
- Musing about dumb shit I saw on 4chan
- Reacting to random announcements (such as HLVR, new Aqours songs, etc.)
- Whatever the hell else I felt like putting on there
It was really the most liberating thing for me. It was a beautiful disaster of compounded insanity, brought on by alcoholism, untreated mental illness, unemployment, limerence, and the overall shitty circumstances of my life between 2018-2020. Honestly, I'd love to somehow make an archive of my old posts at some point, because it's equal parts fascinating and embarrassing in retrospect. Unless something in my life seriously goes wrong again, I doubt I will ever return to how I was during this time.
Anyway, the blog went through a few updates:
There were also a few other layout changes that occured:
The last layout here is actually the one that my current layout is built upon! It's probably among my favourites, hence why I ended up using it again a few years later.
Era of reagnyan (2020-2021)
Returning to Neocities: eventually, I changed my main Neocities site name to "reagnyan" from siralos, based off my name (Reagan) -- I later bought the domain reagnyan.moe, which ngl I still think it kinda cute. Weirdly enough, I barely have any files from my site during this time. I had a HDD fail on me in I think 2022, and I'm guessing that with it all my files were lost, so now it only lives on through archive.org. RIP.
This was my splash page:
And then enter my fancy new 3 column layout, as I assume I had finally grasped using flex/grid in CSS:
As you can tell by how minor all the layout edits were, I actually really liked this design and it stuck around for quite awhile. I actually had fun changing up the colour schemes every now and then.
However, I think the highlight of this layout was what I had titled "reagspace":
To be quite honest, despite the unoriginality of it, I really enjoyed making this layout -- I think there's something really fun about remaking layouts from the ground up to be more efficient and suit your personal usage. It ditched the shitty table-based layout and instead utilised flexbox(? I think anyway lol) for modern responsiveness, and I honestly kept using this for quite awhile.
(Also: I have since uploaded this layout for free use as Yourspace!)
Other than that, not much interesting happened during this time, and eventually I had a revelation at some point that I was tired of managing multiple websites. And so... I decided to just stick with one domain, and that was feargarden.
Staying as feargarden (2022-now)
At some point during the reagnyan era, I switched my domain from feargarden.xyz to just fear.garden -- that's the one I'm using right now! I also gave up on my blog (probably for the best) and separately hosting the site, and so reagnyan was once again renamed to feargarden.
Of course, this called for another layout swap! Enter my new and improved splash page that I still really like (and is in fact still used on the Neocities site today):
And the new layout:
To be honest, I don't even remember using this one but saw it while I was crawling through the archives... it looks to be a modification of the reagnyan layout into just 2 columns, using my standard colour scheme.
The layout that I remember the most, succeeding this one, is the one you can still see on my Neocities today) (at least, as of writing anyway) -- this was my "5th anniversary" layout in 2022:
This layout... is so ass. The intention was to create a Project Diva-based layout (based on the PSP games), but I never got far with it and I gave up pretty quickly. Honestly, I hate this design. I never even put in the effort to make it mobile responsive despite knowing how, so it looks really gross on small displays, and overall it's just... eugh. The fonts are bad, the headers are terrible, it's just so... yuck. I feel like I could do a better attempt at a Project Diva layout today (maybe if I ever end up giving the vocalsynth pages their own theme I'll give it another shot), but looking at this iteration just pisses me off. I can't believe I thought this was good at one point.
Anyway, fear.garden lived on Neocities for awhile, until at some point in 2023 I got tired of being on Neocities. I ended up moving my domain back to a VPS, and tbh I barely updated my site after that.
There were a few iterations afterwards, mostly just expanding on the splash page:
Before finally, in mid-late 2025, I decided to yoink and update an old layout I had lying around :
This was what the site looked like until fairly recently -- this was a modification of the last feargarden.xyz layout, and was my first time ever completely ditching my standard colour scheme. If I ever make a dark theme for my site I might bring it back, but I feel like the light colours are more fitting with how I currently feel.
Up until this point, feargarden was hosted on my VPS with Pleroma -- that VPS ended up costing me 20$/month, and by the end I stopped caring or wanting to use it, so I ended up ditching it in I think December. However, this also meant that I would need to find a new host for my website.
I considered hosting it on one of my Oracle VPSs, but as I was exploring my options I noticed that Nekoweb had decent Git support available, which would work nicely with my workflow if it was real, actual Git support and not something like the dumb crap Neocities had. Thankfully, it was just normal ass Git support. Yay! Nekoweb "cute kitty" is like 6$/month after currency conversion here, but it's not the worst and still a fraction of what I was paying before, so I don't mind. I don't really have any other subscriptions anymore, anyway.
I ended up sticking with the above layout for awhile, but it started to feel very boring to me. I liked the colours and general aesthetic of it, but it just felt so... bland. I started playing around with some ideas, and after some experimentation with other pages I came to a realisation that I had forgotten from the reagnyan days: 3 column layouts are peak.
Present day, present time
And so, here we are now. Thanks for accompanying me down the rabbit hole. It does not feel like it has been 9 years at all, and I'm surprised I'm still around (but also not really).
I see people see that they feel they need to delete their sites or quit should they not feel like updating, but I don't think that needs to be the case. I've gone through periods of little to no updates, but I never felt the desire to erase everything.
I write and sometimes post to AO3, but it's under anon. I don't make art that I post publicly. I have nothing to share with others of my own creation except for this site. I prefer leaving my site up no matter what happens, as this is essentially my one and only proof that I was here -- that the person who is "Nyarlathotep" at one point existed.
Anyway, I guess I'll keep at it for now. Next year will officially be me reaching a decade, huh?
Other things
I mentioned in the 2026 goals blog post that I wanted to learn a language, and I did end up starting to learn Japanese. Yippee!! Starting was definitely the hardest part, but I feel like things are going well so far.
Anki is a pretty cool program, even if I don't really understand shit about how it works. So far I've managed 8 days in a row of practice... I guess we'll see how far I can go. My brain is pretty small and I have a hard time studying (god forbid I have to watch a video to learn something), so I think my progress will be slow, but I'm hoping I can reach N5 by the end of the year ;w;
We'll see if I can actually stick with it though, LOL