I've been exploring building my own little space on the web, trying to bring in some content from the Fediverse and/or make my own website ActivityPub powered.
I've not given up on that entirely, but I also wasn't getting anywhere with it. And honestly, I was lacking inspiration.

I'd also been playing around with omg.lol, this neat little corner of the internet, mostly built by @[email protected]. You can tell it's a passion project. It's filled with wonderful, sometimes wonky, often unfinished features. But it's lovely.

So, I built my own website on the platform. What follows is a description of what I've done and how I've done it. Maybe it will be informative for someone. And if you have any questions, you can always ask me via the Fediverse. There are links at the bottom of this post. But we'll get to that...

Home Page

The first thing I was playing with on omg.lol was the "Profile Page" (also known as Web Page). There's a neat little markdown editor with documentation specifially designed for building a simple linktree-like home page. After reviewing the options, I chose to use the Gamer theme by Stan van de Wiel, but with my own modifications to make it more personal.

I don't know why, exactly, but I'm a big fan of the Rubik font, so I had to use that. I made my profile picture round, and changed the "RGB lights" gradient to be different shades of purple to better fit my asthetic.

I also stumbled accross pronouns.design which is a design proposal for little icons to represent your pronouns, so I added that in, too. It just adds that little something to have a visual icon there.

There is a little bit more to say about this home page, but I'll cover it in another section below.

Here's a link to an archived version of my profile page: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524034749/https://deathau.omg.lol/

Now

Another feature of omg.lol is the "Now Page". Inspired by the concept originally by Derek Sivers, a now page is just a page to show off what you're focused on at this point in your life.

Again, it provides a markdown editor, very similar to the profile page one, and it was simple enough to just write up some text about where I'm at. I also used the example and listed some stuff about what I'm reading, watching, playing, etc.

It uses the very same theme as the profile page, so it's very simple. It also has the option to send email reminders to update the page. You can even simply reply to the email with your edits to the page, and it will update automatically (although the first time I tried that it ended up duplicating everything, so I'm still working that out).

Again, I've captured an archive of the now page: https://web.archive.org/web/20240524035946/https://deathau.omg.lol/now

Statuslog

Another part of the service is a statuslog. You just type out a status, pick a relevant emoji, and post it. It reminds me of early Facebook, back when that was fun. It posts these statuses to status.lol, and my own feed is at deathau.status.lol.

Also, you can connect it up to Mastodon to post new statuses automatically. I run my own instance of Friendica, rather than Mastodon, but fortunately it implements the Mastodon API and I had no trouble settting it up.

Finally, there is also a section for a webhook, so you can send the status somewhere else on the internet. This is pretty great, and I will circle back to this later.

Weblog

And this is where we really get into the meat and potatoes of my setup. By all accounts, weblog.lol was something Adam knocked up quickly over the course of a month. As such, it has many quirks.

On the surface, you're presented with yet another markdown editor to write blog posts. You get your own weblog.lol domain (mine's deathau.weblog.lol) and your posts will appear on there in a nice, simple theme.

Me being me, though, I didn't want a nice, simple theme. I wanted to go crazy.

In addition to markdown files with blog posts in them, you can also create non-post pages, custom templates, even upload other files (sort of). There is also a GitHub action to be able to publish a git repository with markdown files as your blog. I already had some stuff from my previous 11ty-based website, so it seemed ideal to operate this way.

My first major hurdle was the CSS.