A NEW START

-Some of these pages are more filled out than others.
-I have an idea of what I want the finished product to look like, but no idea of how to actually get there.
-This site should be updated daily (almost) until it is finished, but I am an engineer, not a programmer, and HTML does not always play nice.

UPDATES?

Good News [09/12/24]

So I actually found a Document from an old court case that ruled web scraping is actually not banned by CFAA and is considered
legal to do (obviously within limits). Now, getting their pages to actually send me info? Thats a whole nother task in and of
itself, and one I don't know. However, this basically means that I don't have to use DownDetectors API, I can scrape the data
theoretically straight off their website. This is obviously however a very fine line, but tbh I think the fact that Ookla has
a service like this, has an api, WITH PUBLIC DOCUMENTATION, but only offeres it to enterprises is kinda ridiculous. Whats that
one quote?- "I'd be happy to pay for it but they don't exactly sell them at Costco". Really thats about it. The chattable
thing is cool, but I have had abismal luck getting my CSS to apply. Maybe I'll start a Pi server as somewhere to store
comments and just make my own section. It will likely stay until I figure it out tho. Anyways thats really all. Stay safe.

Outage Detector Now Works [09/11/24]

I managed to get some of the status links working but as per usual, I had a new more complicated idea. While it's cool to
ping a website or server, it doesn't neccessarily mean that said SERVICE is actually down. A great example of this is Ubisoft.
R6 servers will go down alot, but the games website will still be up and accessable. This is a common trend. Realistically the
only time any of the service indicators will go red is if the whole mf internet goes down. Additionally, just because a website
goes down, doesn't mean the actual service is down.
"Okay then ping the servers?"
Thats hard and also prone to breaking. My first thought is DownDetector, but ofc their API costs money. Their TOS
also doesn't allow for data scraping, and I'm a very small website, so it's likely that I would get away with it, but If the
same IP is scraping the same websites for the same variables everytime someone visits, it would not take long for them to catch
on and the last thing I need is CAD or a lawsuit rn. Call me crazy but these tech companies don't play arround. Ive seen dudes
get years in prison for distributing freeware available on Microsoft's website. It's ridiciulous. Anyways. I'm sure I'll find
some way, just gimme time.

Finally Did It [09/09/24]

I finally became a NeoCities supporter, meaning alot of functions will start working. One of those being the forms. Forms
actually work now. Please don't flood my inbox. This also means I can make API calls, and can request data from other sites,
so certain functions will be working shortly. I want to also change the domain. Thinking of "Dougs.kitchen". Its cheap and
unique, but also might be confusing to people who dont know better. A .kitchen adress is exceedingly rare so. Who knows. I
could also do .org but, Idk I feel like people will forget its .org and use .com and get lost. I suppose we will see. That all
looks rather complicated to set up so it will probably be a minute until I change it.

Slight Intermission [09/05/24]

So some recent 'endevors' have not proven fruitful given the ammount of time I was putting into them. This is a problem, so the
time I usually use to work on this, will probably start going to that. That means updates and progress will get more sparse.
Realistically the vision is this; Get the website framed out, so I can add shit as needed in the future. The whole enitre idea
behind even starting this in the first place, was to have a place to easily download programs I make. When I started it in June,
I never imagined sticking with it this long. That's always been the thing I admired most about programming, the end result is
never far off. I actually typed an 8 in the date by accident, I got so used to daily logs of stuff I've changed. Now its September,
which is wild. It started with a barebones frame that I got from ChatGPT. It had a nav bar which means I needed to add subjects.
I had alot of them. I took a week off, feeling over whelmed with no idea of how to even start, and from there just thought about
ideas with little to no intention of completion. The first page I did was support, and I actually enjoyed the work. Fast-foreward
to today and every fucking page has its own mf theme. I never thought I would finish the "SOFTWARE" section. What I was trying to
do would have taken an experienced programmer at least a few days to do. I didn't even know HTML structure and I had the whole
thing done in a week. IT was pretty rewarding, and unfortunetly my abitions only grew from there. But I still have issues with
CSS and structuring. Anyone who looks at my sourcecode would realize I really don't excell at programming. I'm at the point now of
"just get it working", which leads to pretty awful looking code, that can break itself. I am also no closer to the mobile version.
All of my CSS is adaptive, which means it just gets really messy when not in 16:9. The fix I'm looking into is just a popup that
literally just tells u it's gonna suck and to turn your phone sideways, which isn't a great answer. Anyways, rambling aside. I
had too many ideas, and too few time to do them right. God isn't that the story of everything? The site is mostly functional, so
Ima just call it even, and accept that its gonna be slower fixing stuff going foreward. But I will go foreward. Sometime around
Christmas I'll have alot of time off and I'll fix alot of this stuff. Until then, sorry if things are slow to change.

We're So Back [09/03/24]

Sorry for the rant last friday. Wasn't really pointed at anyone but I figured I was gonna have to explain myself at some point.
That being said fuck the themes I wanna get some of this shit working. So turns out NeoCities does NOT support PHP or SQL,
which means getting the comment section functioning is gonna be a nightmare. Honestly I don't know what I was expecting.
Allowing server side edits to anyone for 5$ a month would be a huge security risk for NeoCities, which is the exact reasoning
they gave as to why its not supported. However I did find a service, suprisingly on NeoCities, called chattable that claims to
offer this service basically indefinetely and completely for free. Okay so what? Facebook and Disqus offer the same services?
Well, asshole, there are a few differences. First off and most importantly for my visitors, both of those services have had
past issues with tracking, something I have a big problem with. Secondly, they don't open source their CSS files. This means
my entire website will be black and green , and this mf is gonna be white and blue/red to match THEIR theme, not mine. My
index may look like shit, but I'll be damned if it looks cheap. So I'm gonna do some looking, and if I like it, i'll add it in.
I am not at the point yet where I wanna do my own server shit so, I'm gonna have to find a workaround for a few years until
I get more big brain and can do that shit myself. Not supporting that shit has me wondering how exactly I am gonna do alot of
the other stuff I have outlined already. As far as I understand, so long as it doesn't have to index with NeoCities servers, I
should be okay. This means API calls should be allowed. Else I might have to scrap some stuff :( I suppose only time will tell.

A Rather Long Message About How I Do Things [08/30/24]

So the Cache Buster is out. It worked fine but the delay shit bothered me and I dont have time to fix it so for now its gone.
Eventually I'll write a better script or actually version date my CSS files but for now its gonna stay as is. Everything is
setup for the holiday themes and TECHNICALLY I have the first 3 done. I'm not sure I like thanksgiving and Christmas is a
mess to say the least. I dont have time rn to fix it tho and I'm not good at design so its gonna take me awile to get
inspiration on what to do. Alot of people have given me their input and the vast majority of the time I get questioned about
the ASCII art or the very bare bones feeling of it all. I am a shitty programmer but that isn't the reason any of this looks
the way it does. I could make this look all official, put some clipart in each corner, make it feel like every McDonalds in
the US does, clean and modern, but empty and souless. That is the complete opposite of what this is for. It looks old and
primitive by design. I don't want any of this to be forgetable. It's suppsed to be loud and hard to read and niche, it's
supposed to feel rough around the edges, because to me thats where the best spaces are. I want this main page to feel like
being in a dark server closet, and this homepage is emmitting from the only monitor in the room. I want it to feel primitive
because when I think of a space like that, this is what I see. I admire old programmers because they were given such tight
restraint on what the code allowed them to do, and they fucking took it to the max everytime. Today, in Silicon Valley,
there is 100 programmers making about 70k a year, who know half of what I do. They spit out copy+paste minimalist, modern,
corprate esque websites all day, and they are the best in their building. They use DreamWeaver, which writes all of their
code for them, and is perfect every time. They go home thinking they're the shit and on paper they are. But people like that
dont impress me. The people who impress me are the ones who are given nothing and still make something worthwhile out of it.
The old MS-DOS programmers were given languages designed to be used and not looked at. They still added UI's, and they still
created a space that was familiar and creative. They took a language that offered them the ability to put text on a screen,
and found a way to add graphics too it. They took the ASCII alphabet and made fucking art with it. Their animations, styles,
ideas and creativity is what gave us what we have today. It was impressive because no one expected it to go that far, no one
expected them to do that, to be creative in a space that literally offered no way TO be creative.
Did you know "Rollercoaster Tycoon Deluxe 99" was written in fucking Assembly? Those of you who have played it know how
impressive that is, and those of you who don't, you should be impressed. Its hard and outside the box; And TO ME, thats
Impressive. Taking literally nothing, and making something. So yes the site looks rough, and it probably will for a long
while, and I sincerely hope it stays that way. Because thats the type of idea I want to bring, and one day, I hope to be
on the list of people who were outside the box as well; who made something out of nothing.

Whats the point in being remebered for doing what everyone else did, when you could be forgotten for changing the world?

Anyways, I'm prolly gonna be gone for a few days, got some shit to deal with, but when I come back the themes are prolly
gonna be the first thing I deal with. Then I'll get some other shit on the index working. See ya soon.
PS: Thanks for 2k viewers :)

Working On Templates [08/28/24]

So the Halloween theme is gone, I got it working correctly and I decided to move onto thanksgiving. I have the ASCII art
switcher working, and theswitching of the photo in the banner and the CSS page being linked should be relatively the same,
Once I have the big 7 done, it should change them automatically which will be really cool. Doesn't easter fall in March
and April? Yikes thats gonna be a nightmare. Oh well. Tommorrow mes problem.

I'm Sure Things Look Off [08/27/24]

So as you can tell the page is now Halloween themed lmao. It's not permanent, but I have to see them in real time to make
sure they work so there will be a couple of odd themes coming and going for a few days or weeks. I want to have a JS that
checks the date and applies the appropriate CSS page depending on what holiday is closest. That might be difficult tho,
and I don't have an abundance of time these days. Halloween is in like 2 months but then Thanksgiving and Christmas are
right after and everyone knows I prolly won't have time then. So like Costco, we start setting up decorations early XD.
I might ditch the idea of using 7.CSS for the support page because it sounds like a waste of a cool style sheet. The site
is never going to change and it has leauges more shit to play with than 98 or XP did. Maybe I'll make a dump section to
just talk about shit that I do. Who knows. I don't wanna be boring but it is my website afterall. Realistically I know
no one reads these but I think its cool so ima do it anyways. Some things are cooler when only you like them anyways.

Okay So I lied [08/23/24]

I have been procrastinating work so I did a couple things. Turns out the same guy that wrote 98.css also wrote 7.css and
XP.css so I turned the 'ABOUT' page into a XP themed settings window, with get this- TABS. How dope. So i'll have about
me, credits, and some other places I took large inspiration from all there. Maybe I can do the same for the 'SUPPORT'
using the 7.css who knows. Also my last post inspired me; I'm gonna change the theme of the home page depending on the
time of the year. I got ASCII art lined up to replace the pot. i'll write JS to rip the date and use it to determine which
css file to use. I also added a weather where you are thing that I think could be really cool. Problem is it relies on 2
different API keys and involves JavaScript, which I don't know. Funny isn't it? Most busy time of the year and I start 3
projects here that would eat ungodly ammounts of time. I really gotta get some of this work done though because it is very
hard and will require alot of time to get right. See you soon (hopefuly).

It's Been a While [08/20/24]

I haven't been on to make any changes lately because life has gotten really busy. It will calm down around christmas
time but until then this site probably will not change for a while. Everything else I have left to do is going to be
very time consuming and quite the headache. I want to save it for when I don't mind the challenge. Theres not much left
realistically, but a few minor things arent where they need to be and 'SOFTWARE' IS WORKING, but currently doesn't
host any files. Yall heard about that Intel microcode shit? well it's come to tear down my main machine so most of my
time is going to go twords repairing my OS as my CPU corrupts it. I still have to fix my old OS as well, both of which
will likely eat the remainder of any time I have left. Good news is getting handy with OS related issues means all the
software recomendations are gonna get way better and I will no doubt be making more BAT files to fix little problems,
all of which I will upload and host here. Still trying to make good templates for the software section but the CSS page
isn't playing nice so. sigh. Maybe I'll add a tree instead of a pot for christmas. Maybe it'll light up. Maybe things
will slow down. Maybe life will get better. I suppose only time will tell. until then, happy halloween, thanksgiving,
laborday, christmas and new years. Be safe and make good choices and i'll be back in either a week or 8 months lmfao.

Figured Out the 'SOFTWARE' Link Switching [08/15/24]

So I was dreading dealing with how I was gonna make the File Explorer index a different iframe based on which link
was chosen from the tree, but I did a little googling and the answer was what I was dreading... JavaScript.
I kept coming back to 'if I could just asign a variable inside of the link section of the iframe I could change it
at will', problem is I have no idea how to do that in java. Turns out? it's about 5 lines of code XD. I asked ChatGPT
to make a website with a list on the side, and then depending on what list item was clicked, it would use that link in
the iframe, and allowed HTML and JS. It spit out an incredibly simple solution. I just modified it to make it work with
the style of everything else. I've learned something about chatbots recently. They are EXTREMELY good at starting fresh,
but pretty horrible at making something else from an existing thing. Its like a toddler, you just have to keep trying
until it understands what exactly you are asking of it. Anyways, expect that page to have rapid function shortly.

Switched Things Up a Lil [08/14/24]

So its pretty obvious... the home page is a lil different. I swapped 'FILES' Out for 'LOGS' which I think makes way
more sense. I already have a 'SOFTWARE' why would I also need a 'FILES'. Moved all of these updates over there
Yknow now that I think of it maybe I should straight up call it file explorer. Hmmmm.
Anyways idk how long th main page will look like this but I like the direction it's going. Oh and I also added
an XP background to 'ABOUT'. That white was getting annoying and hurting my eyes.
This iframe shit is really changing how I do all of this alot. Makes my life much easier. More to come.

Making Steady Progress [08/13/24]

So I am actually almost done with the file system UI, you can check it out if you'd like but as of rn, it doesn't do
much. Problem is im now going to have to use iframes inside of other iframes to make the tree actually interactive.
This is way beyond what I know how to do. This might take a while. I'm also thinking of moving these updates to a
different page and changing the style a bit. Not gonna lie, it can be difficult to follow at times with this green
ass text. I like the direction but its current state needs work. XD
(P.S. I don't think my cache busting shit is working so ._. I might remove it and start using actual file versions.)

Found a Solution [08/12/24]

After feeling rather defeated yesterday I didn't really want to work on the FILES or SOFTWARE pages anymore because
what I was trying to do was gonna take a very long time, and I wasn't sure it was possible. However today the
'iframe' operator was brought to my attention. Essentially this allows me to run a seprate HTML doc inside of
another HTML doc. How does this help? Well this pretty much allows me to use seprate CSS pages for each part,
exactly what I was stuck trying to do. Regardless this will still take quite a while to get perfect, but now I know its
possible and just requires time. I probably wont link it on FILES until it's done, because it's gonna look messy until
it is, but do know it is coming.

Working on FILES and SOFTWARE [08/11/24]

I am working on setting up a DOS esque file explorer for where I host my files, Problem is It requires using a CSS file
that I did not write. Its difficult because up until this point I have used one CSS page to set the entire rest of the
site up. Unfortunetly HTML does not allow you to pull from one CSS page for one section and another for another.
This means I either have to use inline styles for the frame of these pages, and then use UNPK to to load the CSS file,
which I will use for the rest of it, or I have to transfer the commands from the one CSS file to mine, renaming and 'diving'
along the way. Fuck. Maybe I'll find a better way, this might take a while.

Added a Pot to the Banner :) [08/08/24]

It wouldnt be a kitchen if there weren't any pans now would it?
ASCII art generators suck and CHATGPT spits out nightmare fuel, and given I knew what I wanted and knew how simple it
would be, I just "drew" it myself. Maybe I'll animate it one day.

Finished "SUPPORT" and Added a Form [08/06/24]

The support page is finished. There is an actual form you can fill out and send, but unfortunetly NeoCities doesn't,
support sending external page requests without premium. One day I'll get a real domain and pay the 5 bucks but it
probably won't be this week haha. The whole page dressed up in the stock 'clouds' background from Win98, upscaled
to 4K. Credit left in about when I get to it.

The Obvious Delay in Style Sheets [08/05/24]

If you noticed, on load the site flashes for about a half second without any formatting. Unfortunely I am clumsy and
will forget to update CSS file versions, so the flash is from a very simple JavaScript that quickly runs and
basically acts as a cache buster. It shouldn't cause problems, and I'm working on a way to make it faster.
It has to wait until the entire site loads before refreshing the CSS, and my hit counter takes on average about
450ms to load. The index is the only page that should have this problem because the other ones arent updated very
frequently and therefore don't run this function. Sorry.