Explanation


Article \\ Explanation


Welcome to my webpage! I've struggled to come up with a website design that I truly liked and I think this idea of making my own Wikipedia-esque page as my webpage might finally scratch that itch. I love reading Wikis, in particular: Wikipedia, Dwarf Fortress's Wiki, Terraria's Wiki, and Realm of the Mad God's Wiki. Since I'm nowhere cool enough to have my own Wikipedia page, I figured that this would be a cool way to practice HTML/CSS/JS and publish a brief description of my life! Since I'm using GitHub Pages as my website host, I don't have access to a server to run my website on, and so everything had to be done client side. Doing so made a few tasks way more tedious than they should be (looking at you referencing, grrr). Despite that, it was fun to try and find the best ways to both design the website and the code itself.

The design is mainly styled off of Wikipedia and the Dwarf Fortress Wiki, and the page content is mainly modeled after the Wikipedia pages of J.R.R. Tolkien, Emil Zátopek, and Sebastian Coe who were a few of the people I looked up to when I was younger. I tried to maintain the highly hyperlinked and referenced style of Wikipedia, but as mentioned earlier doing so is quite tedious without server-side code. In particular, since references in Wikipedia go back-and-forth between both the references section and the inline citations, it was quite easy to mess up.

I made some changes to the style of Wikipedia which I found suited my purposes better. These included:

I also added some new themes since I felt like it. Since this site is entirely client side, that was a fun feature to implement. There are the following themes:

Overall, it was fun to dig through and relive some of my memories, and create a (in my opinion) cool presentation of them. I hope you enjoyed the journey as well :)

Nathan Gurrin-Smith