If you're struggling to get into or maintain these sorts of routines, I personally think it's better to figure out what doesn't work for you rather than trying to find the "perfect" book and/or app.

Some of my preferences:

physical books for planning + in-depth journaling, minimalistic cover and layout, small/thicker books with hardcover instead of big/flimsy books, undated planners

My current system:

This doesn't include everything that I use, like my blog or the media tracking apps that I use. Those are things I do on the side for fun, and I don't rely(?) on them for productivity.

Some of my thoughts:

I get to skip over weeks in my planner without wasting any pages since I have to set up each spread (which isn't hard at all). I prefer smaller, sturdier books because the bigger the page size, the more I feel the need to write + it's hard to take the book out and about. I would rarely get into 5 pages of a sketchbook because I would make myself think that I'm not "using it right", so I bought a cheap sketchbook from Walmart and told myself that it was "nothing but a bunch of printer paper that just so happens to be held together". This mindset especially has been so helpful for me! I stopped caring about making my routine "aesthetic" and usually avoid looking for inspiration online. I can't buy any new books until I fill out the ones that I currently have. When starting my new routine, I avoided any books that looked cute because I thought I would "ruin" them.

Journaling methods:

I bought this 5-year memory journal from Walmart back in 2023. Even though I don't keep up with it every day, it's very rewarding to look back and see my answers from previous years. Some of the prompts are time-sensitive (like "what did you eat for dinner today"... That is leaving my memory after 12 hours...), but there are some other prompts where I can go back if I've missed them and put myself in the mindeset of Past Rin.

For anyone out there that is strictly using Neocities's code builder, I recommend using anything else... Be free... Or don't, that's okay! I haaated coding through Neocities, so I've been using VS Code with a live preview feature. I can make all sorts of changes to my site, and no one else will see it until I'm happy with my updates, save the files, and upload them to Neocities. I used to have a VS Code to GitHub to Neocities thing where I only had to click a couple of buttons to automatically update my site, but I accidentally broke this script when I switched laptops and never bothered to fix it.

If you hover over the images, you can also see that some of them move. One of my favorite discoveries was applying animations/transformations to random elements. There are a lot that you can find online or create yourself (like jumping/wiggling/spinning effects), though I can only offer the small zoom + tilt animation that you can copy and paste into your files.

You can play with this even more, like changing the color of images when hovering over them.

/* put this in style */ .image-effect { filter: grayscale(100%); /* you can replace "grayscale" with saturate, sepia, blur, opacity, etc. */ } .image-effect:hover { filter: grayscale(0%); */ same advice as before. you can also change the percentage to anything */ } <!-- put this in body--> <img src="" class="image-effect">

When using images, setting the width/height to percentages (%) instead of pixels (px) usually prevents a lot of issues with elements overflowing/breaking out of the divs that they're in. It also helps if you're using multiple images and want a consistent look. Instead of having a bunch of random numbers for your image size to fit a given div (like giving every image the width of 237px for a div that's 400px wide), I find it easier to visualize, "I want this image to take up 80% of this div's width, so I'll set the width to 80%". This also applies to videos, divs, etc.

The tabcontent script solos iframes any day. In my opinion... But I should probably explain what any of this means......

Have you noticed on my site (and many others) that even when you click certain buttons in a navigation section, it changes the text in the "main section" that you were already looking at instead of taking you to a new page? Some people achieve this effect by using iframes, which was also what I did for a very early version of Sunfish Dreamworld. It's basically like creating a "cut-out" in the "main section" (by using the target function I think... I can't remember), and you create extra pages ("outlinks.html", "sitemap.html", "blog_entry1.html", etc.) to fill in that cut-out. I hated how cluttered it made my site folder, and if someone were to right-click on any of the buttons in your navigation that is supposed to display the iframe, they can just open the page in a new tab and view your site as (presumably) unintended. Instead of seeing "www.site.org/home/outlinks", they would be seeing "www.site.org/outlinks". If that makes sense. There's also sometimes a tiny delay when switching through iframes (at least, what I've noticed) because it's grabbing the other html files to display. These aren't huge issues + they're helpful if you wanted to incorporate something like a guestbook without having to leave your site. I just didn't really like it.

I switched to using a tabcontent script after seeing a visual novel review page where clicking each title in the navigation section instantly brought up the review in the main area. I looked through the webmaster's code and noticed that every review was on this one page of html instead of multiple html pages being linked to the review page, and I really wanted to recreate this. Although I won't go in-depth about how to achieve this now, I'll at least point you in the right direction for anyone interested. I followed this navigation tabs tutorial from W3Schools and slowly applied it to my own site. If using scripts scares you, the script itself is only about 5-15 lines long (depending on how exactly you want it to function), and once you put it in your code, you shouldn't have to touch it again!

Similar to adding small animations to images and other elements, you can even add an "ease in" animation for when you highlight links. It's one of those things that a lot of people probably don't notice, but I do, and that's all that matters...

There have been so many times where I wanted to recreate something for my own site, but when I try to describe what I'm looking for, it always seems like the internet has no idea what I'm talking about, so I feel like an idiot when I try searching "how do i put a bunch of images together and they're all close together like on pinterest or something???". So this section is a little encylopedia of terms to point you in the right direction, and I'll keep updating it as I remember/come across more.

If you accidentally burn a pot or pan while cooking, the black marks can be removed by putting in water, a generous amount of baking soda, and bringing it to a boil and later scrubbing the bottom. Rinse and repeat if necessary. I found this out after accidentally getting burn marks on a very expensive stainless steel pot that did not belong to me, and I honestly didn't think it would work until I tried it myself. I've heard that if you have burn marks on the underside of a pot/pan, you can place it inside a wider pan with the water and baking soda, though I haven't tried this.

Although the term SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is probably thrown around a lot, I have noticed a pattern where I feel so sleepy and lazy and miserable and many other things during the colder seasons. I've been recently trying out a few things to not let it affect me so much, although I haven't tried everything out for the middle of winter yet.

Without going into too much detail, I accidentally got a minor fingernail infection over the summer, presumably from taking care of a few sick animals and not washing my hands as thoroughly/often as I should have. I considered going to a clinic, but I found online that ichthammol ointment can help treat paronychia, so I bought some from my local grocery store. I promise I'm not exaggerating when I say that I saw Instant Results because the swelling had noticeably gone down by the end of the day, and I didn't have an infection anymore after 2-3 days. Just when I started feeling silly for buying a whole tube of ointment for just one temporary issue, I found out that it works great with other skin irritations too— especially bug bites!