Vidapon's Artbox is a small personal "artistic" website built by Astertrail Vidapon, aka yours truly. The primary purpose of its existence is for me to express myself in a more unique and special way, without having to be restrained by the lack of customization in modern internet.
The site has since become a little "personal home" for me. It is not particularly built for other people in mind, however efforts to make the website readable and accessible for anyone is something that I am trying to push for constantly. I hope I am able to deliver well!
WHY A PERSONAL WEBSITE?
Since the entire site is made up by my hands and held together with glue and tape, the only limitation I would have is my brain. Whether it would be from a creative standpoint, or just me not being able to understand how code works. (Half of the time I still don't, but it's fine) Other than those two things, I'm basically free to make my site look however I want it to! Not being limited to just an icon, banner and solid colour on my profile is honestly really cool.
A personal website is also a really good place to host your own art all in one place! It's really nice to be able to host most of my good stuff on one page instead of having it be scattered across social media. Even if the original social media posts get deleted, my art will still be hosted here for all to see.
CODING RESOURCES
While I hadn't used or referenced any pre-made templates while building this webspace, of course code doesn't just come out of thin air. Here's a list of places I've used for help/assistance with making it all!
- W3Schools - Probably the first website I discovered after creating my Neocities. This website is a very valuable resource and I've likely learned half of my coding skills from it. It covers practically all the basics and even allows you to mess around with the tutorial code!
- sadgrl.online - Also a very good place to start for newcomers to HTML/CSS. I have referenced a couple of their guides for help on certain elements of my website, such as floating images and div backgrounds! They also have a website template which I haven't used, but I believe is a good place to start for people new to coding.
- Brad Woods' Layout Generator - My most used resource in this list, I believe. This Layout Generator massively helps with visualizing the way you want your website to look layout-wise!
ALL ABOUT THE WEBMASTER
Well, hello there! My name is Aster. I'm a 20-something y/o Filipino thing from Canada. I'm a digital artist and an aspiring character designer! I like to collect CDs, figurines, and plushies. I'm running out of room for all of them...
I'm practically an internet hermit in the sense that I don't usually try to meet new people, but occasionally I'll climb out of my little corner to surf Neocities for other cool sites. I'm just not good at approaching others... but don't worry, I don't bite!
I started coding back in March 2022 because I wanted to make my own personal home on the interwebs. It's paid off quite well, I'd say! Despite being a novice coder I feel like I've managed to make something worthwhile with this website. It's like a different form of art to me. It's pretty neat!
MY HISTORY ON THE NET
I was one of those kids who had unsupervised access to the internet a little too early. I grew up in the early 2000's, and my family owned a PC running Windows XP. While most of my time was spent playing the N64, I would also occasionally go on the computer to watch flash animations on Newgrounds. Some were... obviously not very appropriate for my single-digit age.
Regardless of all the problems that brought, I was thankfully able to live in the era of internet where everything was more funky and colourful. Remember when you could just edit the background of your YouTube profile? I never owned an account in that era because I was way too young, but it was fun to see what kind of jpeg people tiled their profiles with. Now everything just looks the exact same. It gets really boring and drab looking at social media.
So when I heard about Neocities, it just sounded like the perfect thing to get into. Though, before I started this website I basically had next to no knowledge of HTML, CSS or any sort of code. After doing the tutorial I slowly learned more and more through sites like W3Schools and stackoverflow, and now the site is how you see it today!
While I know this is already a little bit obvious I do still feel the need to say that I am FAR from a coding professional. I still feel like a noob when I code sometimes. I am artist first and foremost, this coding thing is mostly just my favourite side-hobby!
SOME STUFF I LIKE
✨ marks a permanent interest, something that I will often find myself coming back to no matter what!
Video Games
In Stars and Time✨, Minecraft✨, Taiko no Tatsujin✨, Patapon/Ratatan, OneShot, Crypt of the Necrodancer, MAD RAT DEAD, Muse Dash, WACCA, Spore, Hollow Knight, Terraria, Just Shapes & Beats, handful of Nintendo things (Super Mario, Kirby, Pokemon)
Animation
AniPoke✨, PROMARE, OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes, Animation VS, Taiko no Tatsujin: Anime Version!
Music
Red Vox✨, The Reign of Kindo, AURORA, Three Days Grace, Scratch21, Bad Moves, Bear Ghost, Go! Child, Tame Impala, Radiohead, Blur
Other Things
Vinesauce, MCYT (Grian, GTWScar, impulseSV, Skizzleman), Nitro Rad, coding, rearranging things, character design, worldbuilding, 88x31 buttons
Hi! I'm Impy! I'm the lil' fella that's been crawlin' all over the website!
I was born on June 4th, 2020. My favourite snack is rock candy!!
I'm the website's little guardian angel (or devil. Depends on how mischievous I'm feeling) and also the mascot, I guess! You should give me pets and snacks over at the front page :P
Now, the question begs.... what is a "Vidapon"? It's not really anything... in fact, it's quite simple, really. Vid = video, Pon = Pata. And the "A" is there to make the name roll off the tongue more nicely.
