EzranExcalibur.com

Changelog | About This Site

I lied in the sidebar! This is less of a changelog and more of a blog about the trials and tribulations of building this site. I hope if you're interested in changelogs you'll still enjoy reading.

5 Aug 2025

I'd been meaning to build this website for a long time--I initially paid for the domain and hosting almost a year ago, and even before that had played around with various other small, bare bones websites as personal projects, with an intention to eventually build something that could bridge the gap between my obsession with 90s-early 2000s personal websites, and professional artist websites. I know if I wanted to be truly "professional", I should just use something like Squarespace. It would be a lot easier, quicker, allow much more complicated features, and overall be more polished. Unfortunately, I also know I wouldn't be satisfied with some squeaky clean cookie cutter site, and paying for something I don't even like the idea of isn't in my budget. So here we are!

I started working on this site in earnest on July 24th, 2025. Then I decided I didn't like what I'd made, so I started over on August 1st, then over the weekend of the second and third spent (by my best estimation) roughly 20 hours researching, reading guides, and scrapping together my little HTML and CSS knowledge. After all that, I ended up with what is essentially some boxes (a grid). But hey--the boxes are RESPONSIVE, and given this was the first time I've really cared about making something that would adjust to different screen sizes even a little bit, that was a win. I took a lot of notes too, which will hopefully be helpful for ongoing updates.

My original goal was to populate the site fully by the end of the weekend--in hindsight, this was a pretty naïve goal, and it got pushed even further into the realm of not being realistic once I got frustrated with cPanel and decided I wanted a better way to push updates. On Sunday night, I wasted about 3 hours (of sleep oTL) on trying to figure out connecting a private GitHub repo, got very confused, and went to bed hoping I'd figure it out the next day. The next day... I was still confused. I eventually settled on the much simpler solution of using Core FTP to transfer files instead. It isn't a perfect option (or I don't really know how to use it), but it works well enough for now. I am still glad I figured out GitHub itself (which was nowhere near as hard as I had expected), but for now I'm considering the cPanel-GitHub direct link a lost cause, at least until something clicks in my head or I decide I don't mind the repo being public.