First Post

April 6, 2025

Hello, welcome to my blog! ¿Cómo estáis?

You can tell I'm a suck up nerd bc despite my main Spanish teachers being from Colombia and Guatemala, I still insisted on learning the vosotros instead of ignoring it. This did not earn me any brownie points.

Well, my teacher who studied in Spain was a bit impressed, but the man was an English teacher and once asked me if "facetious" was a real word, so I really didn't put much stock in his opinions.

But, enough about him, before I get distracted talking about high school English classes.

What have I been up to lately?

The quarter's started, so a couple classes, I have an interview in a week I'm preparing for, and obviously I've been watching a lot of Law and Order. Besides all that I've been nalbinding and thinking about websites.

At my internship I've been given a project to improve the library's catalog site, but I'm not super optimistic about it. There's a lot of things I'd like to do, but the OPAC itself has really limited options. It just isn't built for the kind of customization I want. Plus, they don't seem to have a way to just. view the whole collection at once without searching for something, and you can't enter a blank search. You ask me, that's a major oversight, and also makes things very difficult. For example, one thing we'd like to do is let users browse the whole Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion collection that we have. It should be easy to add a button that returns all items in the EDI category, but in actuality, the OPAC only lets users pull out a category after a search has been made. Since you can't do a search that returns the whole collection, there's no way to return everything in a single category. I have a feeling the only way to actually do this is to make a reading list manually with everything from the EDI collection. Very unfortunate.

Another thing is that the site can only have specific pages made, which are pre-defined and named and only allow certain content. What kind of platform does this. I mean, I guess a library really ought to have its own site separate from the catalog. Which, I fear, is probably the solution I'm going to have to espouse. Which means I have to find a website building platform I can stomach, since, as much as I love writing html, to do so for a website I will soon pass on to other caretakers is irresponsible in the modern day. Alas.

Anyway.

I've also been doing some reading about databases and using JSON as an alternative. Specifically, I've been thinking mostly about my idea for cataloging the Magnus Archives statements. Since I want it to be searchable, I think a database is the proper solution, and I'll just have to deal with what I feel is the inefficiency of having so many different tables rather than being able to store an array. Like, I understand what must be done to deal with having more than one entry in a cell, but like. why. I will have to be very good about naming my tables or I will lose track of them immediately.

On the other hand, I was thinking of using a database to keep track of these blog posts, but first of all, neocities doesn't allow the use of databases, and number two, JSON will just be a million times simpler. Shoutout to Making of Neon and also library school for teaching me what JSON even is.

Right. Well, I think this post is about done, so I'm gonna go off and actually try to put my JSON knowledge to use.

Wish me luck!