TIFU: when u play urself thru coding
Image Desc.: A screenshot of Christa's very rainbow and pastel status cafe
So, I made a status.cafe because I wanted to play with a micro-blog format that wasn't on the fediverse or ATProto. I'm pretty dedicated to sticking to a common theme when it comes to my (indie)web presence.
And right now that means...
- Catering to my inner child
- Lots and lots of pastels
- So many fucking rainbows I want it to look like my page puked them
- Lo-fi, pastelcore, vaporwave aesthetic
Because it's a different space, I also wanted to make it a lil different, so I used a different background and went for a light mode (after much deliberation, anyway.) And because it's a place that acts like a [redacted bird app], I ended up styling the statuses like they were speech bubbles. Because that shit tickles me.
so what is the issue?
Well, friends. There is no easy way to view your CSS in real-time on status.cafe unless you're frequently and consistently updating it live through the site's dashboard. I mean, luckily, the whole production is lightweight enough to do so without using a whole ton of bandwidth (at least I'd hope so on the developer's end. But I learned that the hard way today.) Anyway, this whole thing reminded me that I very much fucked myself over by exceeding my family's domain bandwidth within two weeks.
I thought it was because of spammers and bots, but it's actually because the .webp file I was using to fuel my subdomain's page (LOL MY B) was taking so much time to load and using so much bandwidth that it ate up the 15GB I get in a month. So... I had to think of a different and more lightweight solution and had to find a place to host that monster of a file externally. Which kind of breaks the rules of brutalist web-design but... you know what? I'm okay with that.
Anyway, I really screwed myself over with this. Thankfully, the month is almost over and I'm hoping that the external image host will help out with the bandwidth issue. But it did remind me that constantly refreshing and visiting my page in real time after editing my files (instead of viewing locally) can uh, fuck you up.