Last year, I first wrote about the project to recreate my old 2004 FFIV fansite, Sygnus Star, on the Neocities platform. Thanks to inspiration from the FFIV Pixel Remaster (which I still need to finishplaying) I’m pretty much done with the restoration of that site now.

I just happened to have kept all of the old files that were needed to rebuild the site from scratch. I did make some updates – this site existed before CSS and stylesheets were widely used – and I’ve learned a whole lot about HTML coding in terms of using CSS that I didn’t know in my youth.

You can check out the Sygnus Star recreation here!

I had so much fun with that project that while I could still tweak a few more things, the gears in my head started moving and I decided I wanted to make a whole nother retro page from scratch. This time, I chose to transform my secondary WordPress blog, Spot of Mummery, into a hand-coded HTML site.

There’s a number of reasons I chose to do this…

• My WordPress subscription renewal was coming up and it felt like the cost to Support Neocities was equivalent or even a better deal for me (I can make up to 30 websites on one account and they even allow you to point a domain to each of them!)
• Sustaining more than one blog with FFXIV content was starting to not make sense – there’s a lot in Spot of Mummery that doesn’t belong here on this blog, but a lot that did. It was starting to take content away from my main blog at that point.
• I’m having an absolute ball building retro websites and the basic content of Spot of Mummery could absolutely fit into that niche!

So over the past week or so, I’ve been busy at work coding the new site.

Check out what I’ve done so far here!

I still have a bunch of work to do to transfer the remaining story content, but overall, I think it’s been a great move for me. I’ve been able to be much more creative and make the page exactly how I want it to be – something you just can’t do in a WordPress.com hosted environment (it’s sometimes hard to do even self-hosted).

Plus I’ve been learning a ton of new things as I find ways to work around not having PHP – CSS and Javascript power this site, but I’ve been able to install an art gallery, blog and more. Of course, I’ve had to rely on third party stuff for things like a guestbook, counter and chat box, but that was always the way even back in the day.