bryce-bucher - Tumblr blog

[bryce-bucher]

Lake Road, Waverly, Ohio.

[bryce-bucher]

beginner’s guide to the indie web

“i miss the old internet” “we’ll never have websites like the ones from the 90s and early 2000s ever again” “i’m tired of social media but there’s nowhere to go”

HOLD ON!

personal websites and indie web development still very much exist! it may be out of the way to access and may not be the default internet experience anymore, but if you want to look and read through someone’s personally crafted site, or even make your own, you can still do it! here’s how:

use NEOCITIES! neocities has a built in search and browse tools to let you discover websites, and most importantly, lets you build your own website from scratch for free! (there are other ways to host websites for free, but neocities is a really good hub for beginners!)

need help getting started with coding your website? sadgrl online has a section on her website dedicated to providing resources for newbie webmasters!

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are the core of what all websites are built on. many websites also use JS (JavaScript) to add interactive elements to their pages. w3schools is a useful directory of quick reference for pretty much every HTML/CSS/JS topic you can think of.

there is also this well written and lengthy guide on dragonfly cave that will put you step by step through the basics of HTML/CSS (what webpages are made from), if that’s your sort of thing!

stack overflow is every programmer’s hub for asking questions and getting help, so if you’re struggling with getting something to look how you want or can’t fix a bug, you may be able to get your answer here! you can even ask if no one’s asked the same question before.

websites like codepen and jsfiddle let you test HTML/CSS/JS in your browser as you tinker with small edits and bugfixing.

want to find indie websites outside the scope of neocities? use the search engine marginalia to find results you actually want that google won’t show you!

you can also use directory sites like yesterweb’s link section to find websites in all sorts of places.

if you are going to browse the indie web or make your own website, i also have some more personal tips as a webmaster myself (i am not an expert and i am just a small hobbyist, so take me with a grain of salt!)

if you are making your own site:

get expressive! truly make whatever you want! customize your corner of the internet to your heart’s content! you have left the constrains of social media where every page looks the same. you have no character limit, image limit, or design limit. want to make an entire page or even a whole website dedicated to your one niche interest that no one seems to be into but you? go for it! want to keep a public journal where you can express your thoughts without worry? do it! want to keep an art gallery that looks exactly how you want? heck yeah! you are free now! you will enjoy the indie web so much more if you actually use it for the things you can’t do on websites like twitter, instead of just using it as a carrd bio alternative or a place to dump nostalgic geocities gifs.

don’t overwhelm yourself! if you’ve never worked with HTML/CSS or JS before, it may look really intimidating. start slow, use some guides, and don’t bite off more than you can chew. even if your site doesn’t look how you want quite yet, be proud of your work! you’re learning a skill that most people don’t have or care to have, and that’s pretty cool.

keep a personal copy of your website downloaded to your computer and don’t just edit it on neocities (or your host of choice) and call it a day. if for some reason your host were to ever go down, you would lose all your hard work! and besides, by editing locally and offline, you can use editors like vscode (very robust) or notepad++ (on the simpler side), which have more features and is more intuitive than editing a site in-browser.

you can use ctrl+shift+i on most browsers to inspect the HTML/CSS and other components of the website you’re currently viewing. it’ll even notify you of errors! this is useful for bugfixing your own site if you have a problem, as well as looking at the code of sites you like and learning from it. don’t use this to steal other people’s code! it would be like art theft to just copy/paste an entire website layout. learn, don’t steal.

don’t hotlink images from other sites, unless the resource you’re taking from says it’s okay! it’s common courtesy to download images and host them on your own site instead of linking to someone else’s site to display them. by hotlinking, every time someone views your site, you’re taking up someone else’s bandwidth.

if you want to make your website easily editable in the future (or even for it to have multiple themes), you will find it useful to not use inline CSS (putting CSS in your HTML document, which holds your website’s content) and instead put it in a separate CSS file. this way, you can also use the same theme for multiple pages on your site by simply linking the CSS file to it. if this sounds overwhelming or foreign to you, don’t sweat it, but if you are interested in the difference between inline CSS and using separate stylesheets, w3schools has a useful, quick guide on the subject.

visit other people’s sites sometimes! you may gain new ideas or find links to more cool websites or resources just by browsing.

if you are browsing sites:

if the page you’re viewing has a guestbook or cbox and you enjoyed looking at the site, leave a comment! there is nothing better as a webmaster than for someone to take the time to even just say “love your site” in their guestbook.

that being said, if there’s something on a website you don’t like, simply move on to something else and don’t leave hate comments. this should be self explanatory, but it is really not the norm to start discourse in indie web spaces, and you will likely not even be responded to. it’s not worth it when you could be spending your time on stuff you love somewhere else.

take your time! indie web doesn’t prioritize fast content consumption the way social media does. you’ll get a lot more out of indie websites if you really read what’s in front of you, or take a little while to notice the details in someone’s art gallery instead of just moving on to the next thing. the person who put labor into presenting this information to you would also love to know that someone is truly looking and listening.

explore! by clicking links on a website, it’s easy to go down rabbitholes of more and more websites that you can get lost in for hours.

seeking out fansites or pages for the stuff you love is great and fulfilling, but reading someone’s site about a topic you’ve never even heard of before can be fun, too. i encourage you to branch out and really look for all the indie web has to offer.

i hope this post helps you get started with using and browsing the indie web! feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any questions or want any advice. <3

[bryce-bucher]

inflict status ailments on that bird

[bryce-bucher]

Dende Does a Kickflip (2024) Alts and WIP:

[bryce-bucher]

[bryce-bucher]

[bryce-bucher]

platforming palestinian joy is just as important as sharing the suffering they're enduring during this genocide. despite continued displacement and bombardment, you cannot steal their joy and spirit. happy birthday to this sweet baby 🖤🇵🇸 may they grow up to see a free palestine

[bryce-bucher]

pls wishlist my game Dungeons of Blood and Dream - I want 10k wishlists for the release and I am so close!

[bryce-bucher]

From: Baroque

[bryce-bucher]

hello!! the Palestine Relief Bundle is live!! for $8 you can get a ton of great games while raising money for the PCRF to bring medical aid to children.

my game BOSSGAME is a part of the bundle, plus killer games like Zero Ranger, Meatpunks, and Lucah! please check it out!

[bryce-bucher]

[bryce-bucher]

keep going

[bryce-bucher]

The Supreme Kai Powers Up (2024)

[bryce-bucher]

The Supreme Kai Powers Up (2024)

[bryce-bucher]

What part of lowpoly modeling is the most difficult?

Honestly that's a hard question. I learned how to do highpoly modeling first, so, by comparison, doing lowpoly felt a lot breezier to learn because everything just takes less time to do. I think the thing that took me the longest to figure out was that, for organic modeling (like plants and characters and animals and w/e), you should start out with a plane or an edge and sort of draw out shapes with extrusions rather than start with a cube. Once I figured out how that kind of organic modeling was done, creating characters became much easier, and I was able to make them look better as well. Texturing can also definitely be pretty difficult depending on your skill set and what it is that you are texturing. I took a lot of photoshop classes growing up, so I'm v comfortable editing photos to create nice photo-sourced textures; however, I am much newer to hand-painting, so the hardest thing for me to texture is definitely human faces. It's probably the only part of creating lowpoly characters that I still regularly struggle with. Either way, I've learned that (for me at least) the best way to create textures for lowpoly assets is to create the texture information in rectangular formations within an image and then arrange the uvs afterwards. I used to do the uvs first and then create the textures to match the uv shapes, but this can end up looking p wonky with lower resolution textures, and it was a lot more time consuming. If you look up textures for ps1 games they are almost always just arranged in rectangles and then the uvs are creatively placed on top of the texture information.

[bryce-bucher]

first, i love your work

second, very excited to find out you have a tumblr

third, whatcha working on now? ^w^

fourth, do you see any (or at least a tolerable amount) proceeds from Switch sales? (bought Fatum Batula and MULO and was wondering if i should rebuy on itch lol)

-tyty -ya -500 CALIBER CONTRACTZ. It a 3d platformer w/gun -Most of my money comes from switch sales I think. I get less of the gross revenue or w/e, but they sell a lot more on there. If you are just lookin' to give me extra support or get the games DRM free then itch is the way to go, but I'm just happy 2 hear people played and enjoyed the games at all.

[bryce-bucher]

I played fatum betula a while back and was already having a great time finding and doing all the stuff and then i got hit by that one part of the fourth color right after i just got into king gizzard so i just wanted to say I appreciated the polygondwanaland jumpscare

shouts out the public domain