About this site
What is this place?
The Ratlands was founded in September 2025. It's my attempt to create a personal website again, and maybe, just maybe, reignite my old childlike joy for making stuff on the internet. So far, it's been working. I really like being part of the indie web!
The site is called "Ratlands" because I had to pick a name and it sounded cool. "Rat" is a great word. Satisfying.
I guess that makes me the Rat. Or the Ratlander.
Under the hood
I'm running Eleventy, which is a JavaScript-based static site generator. I've never been a JavaScript enjoyer (honestly I think it's an incredibly cursed language created by sickos and perverts) but I've been happy with Eleventy so far. Templating means I can write most pages in Markdown and only have to think about HTML when I want to, and it's easier to dynamically generate lists of pages (like blog posts or projects) or switch up the layout across multiple pages at once.
You're viewing this site on glorious NeoCities. You can follow my NeoCities profile if you want!
I don't have any particular design philosophy beyond what's legible, what's easy for me to maintain, and what tickles my fancy. The site is not optimised for all screen sizes, but is somewhat responsive. I believe accessibility in web design benefits all users and try to consider things like alt text, semantic tagging and colour contrast.
I don't use AI for coding, writing or producing anything else on this website because fuck that shit lol. Making things with your hands and brain is the whole point! Why deprive yourself of that?
The whole date format thing
I've gotten into the habit of writing numeric dates year-month-day (so 25 January 2026 is 2026-01-25). Originally this was because it's the optimum format for automatically sorting dates, since it goes from least to most specific. So for things like blog posts, where I want the newest ones to be at the top, it made sense to store the date this way.
I could do something in the backend to display day-month-year instead, but honestly I kinda like the idiosyncracy. (I will not be doing month-day-year though because that is an abomination. It doesn't make sense! It doesn't make sense!!)
Credits
I found a lot of the gifs on GifCities.
The background of the "So hot right now" section on the homepage is a photo of the Rosette Nebula sourced from the Wikimedia Commons.
Many images have been processed with Dither It for quicker load times and vibes.
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