Today is the one year anniversary for this site! Thank you to everyone who has taken time to visit my site, those who have left kind messages in my guestbook, and my neocities mutuals who do cool and creative things on their sites (check them out they're on my links page). I appreciate all of you! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

Over the past year, No. 5493 has accumulated almost 25k page views on neocities, as well as around 1.4k unique viewers (accoording to my hit counter so take that with a grain of salt). I really appreciate that I can share the things I make with all of you!

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Over the past year, I feel like this site has had a positive influence on my life. I have learned so much about html/css, just started learning js, and it has given me confidence to work on other projects in programs like Godot with GDScript (similar to python). It also gives me something to update somewhat regularly, which for someone like me, it is honestly a feat that we made it to a year. I also have noticed that I spend a lot less time on social media sites and spend more time browsing other people's sites because its just so much better.

I think what initially held me back at first from creating a site was how difficult I perceived coding to be. After I began to learn, it continued to feel like I was way out of my scope, but eventually things just kind of clicked in my brain due to working with the different concepts and being exposed to it for enough time. It really is similar to learning a foreign language; the best way to learn is to be immersed in it. For example, below is what my first site layout looked like. When I made it I was still learning a lot of things about html and css and I didn't feel very confident about it.

After I learned more, I began to experiment without the aid of external resources and came up with the current layout. Is this layout coded correctly? Probably not. Does it work? ...i hope (can u see this??)?

For this next year, I want to focus on adding more content to the site. This year has kind of been hectic so far (but hopefully has calmed down for a while), so I haven't been able to devote a ton of time to adding stuff like new pages ever since I updated my layout. Also, depending on my progress with learning JS, I may end up redoing my site because I have a couple of cool layout ideas rattling around in my skull.

I know that this post is kind of just random and rambly, but I really just wanted to express my gratitude to you (especially if you made it through whatever that was) so thanks for visiting!
Here's to another year of learning and trying our hardest! (o゜▽゜)o☆