Baby's First Blog Post

Tuesday, May 26, 2026 | 1353 words

Hello everyone, and welcome to tri4ge.icu, running on it's 2.0 layout (and also happy birthday to me, as this is published on my birthday!)

This is an update that's been a long time coming, as the 1.0 layout of this site was amateur work and desperately in need of recoding from the ground up. Ever since I started working on 1.0's layout, I learned a lot more about coding and website structural integrity, and have been wanting to change the way this site looks and operates since I first published it in September of 2025.

By that point, I had 1.0's layout in a semi-finished state for nearly a year, and was stuck with a dilemma between not publishing what I worked on over a year ago due to not being happy with my work, or publishing it anyway for the sake of getting my commission information and terms of service up (which I ended up not doing many commissions due to health problems). Of course, I ended up choosing the latter, opting to keep it up for the meantime since I had ran out of energy and motivation for coding after working on my last project (a personal website, which I won't link here, but it isn't impossible to find if you know where to look for it). Even so, I always had plans to code everything from scratch all over again, and I'm very glad to have found the opportunity to do just that.

Going in-depth about the creation of this website...

The site is made using 11ty as my static site generator. This was my second time having used it, and I adore it all the time. It makes everything look so clean, and I love all the features I was able to include on this site. I do have plans of checking out other SSG's like Astro and Hugo at some point, but for now, I think 11ty does what I need my website to do at this time.
The site uses flexbox as my choice of layout module, since it's my current favourite. It makes coding responsive layouts a breeze in my opinion, and it does what I need it to do perfectly!
The navigation is now in a sidebar codepiece rather than a header on desktop, and I think it looks way cleaner this way! Plus, it's perfectly responsive for mobile as well—a win-win in my opinion.
Speaking of responsive sites, I've worked hard to make this site even more accessible than it was! The light/dark mode toggle has remained from the site's last layout, but I've also added hover-to-play gifs over the 'play/pause gif' toggle buttons I used to have, as well as a 'back to top' button! Of course, there's a double-edged sword here where a lot of these features run using Javascript, which can be a hindrance to accessibility, but these things wouldn't work the same (or even at all) without it. I still try to keep my Javascript usage to a minimum as much as possible, but it's rather difficult to do this.
The /home page is much tidier, in my opinion. I've cut down on a lot of the info that was on it for organisation and accessibility reasons, and I think it looks a lot more clean this way. As much as I loved having my site stats and Last.FM scrobbler on there, I felt these just added unnecessary filler to what is supposed to be an art-focused website.
The gallery pages are now all combined together, rather than having them split up by year. This is because I'm now able to post each art piece as it's own individual markdown file and tag each piece with whatever tags I want. Of course, the drawback is that every tagged post on my site—both artwork and blog posts—get filtered into the same category, and I'm not sure how to fix that yet in a way that isn't convoluted. Otherwise, I think my gallery works great and performs way better than my last one did, which was dependent on a lightbox. This tutorial was pretty much the reason how I discovered that this was even possible with 11ty.
The fursuits page was not included in this revamp and has since been taken down, but fear not—I do plan on doing something with this! My plan/dream is to code my own fursuit company website from scratch for when I start taking commissions for suits and selling my own premades. Keep an eye out for this project in the future, I have many plans for it when I can get the chance to work on it.

Oh yeah, and this blog is a new addition to the site too. I've always wanted a blog on this site, but at the time I didn't have the expertise or layout to really support a functioning blog. I almost went with something like BearBlog to host my blog posts, but I really wanted to host my own fully functioning blog. Zonelets was another thing I considered for the last layout, and I actually got pretty close to installing it, before I gave up because I couldn't understand how to do a blog roll on my home page or do tagged posts with it.

Luckily, 11ty is the perfect tool for creating static blogs, and I'm able to have a ton of features with my posts, like tags, post dates, and word counts. It's great, and I really look forward to utilising this blog more. Seriously can't recommend 11ty enough for anyone wanting to make a static site that has the same layout across several pages in a way that's easy to set up, this tutorial by Flamed Fury is easily the best I've found on setting up your first site with 11ty.

As for what I want to post on here in the future... I'm honestly not sure? I do have a blog on my personal website (again, IYKYK), so I don't want to repeat a lot of the content I have there onto here. But I think it's safe to say that I'll be including writings that pertain to furry culture, creative works, convention reviews, and perhaps the odd political piece here and there on this site. I'm sure I'll figure out what I want this blog to contain as time goes on and I get a better feel for this site and it's purpose.

Even with this site's new layout being open to the public, I'm always planning new and improved features to it, so this is a project that I don't imagine will ever be 100% 'finished.' I have plans on doing Wiki-style pages for each of my fursonas that will be hosted on here, as well as getting a guestbook up and running and uploading some of my artwork pre-2023 (which admittedly isn't a lot, I went through a dry period during 2021 to 2022 where I created little to no artwork.)

All this said, I'm excited to present tri4ge.icu's 2.0 layout, and I look forward to the future of this site as I continue to learn more about web development and coding! Hope everyone enjoys what this site has to offer, and is just as excited as I am to watch it grow with me :)