Oh I know it is a bad idea. With an already busy life with kids, family, work, courses and exercising (?) the last thing one should do is writing a webpage and blog from scratch using Neocities. Nothing wrong with Neocities, but it is not like a Tumblr, Wordpress.com or any of the other "You just write and we'll take care of the rest" websites. But the problem is, none of them do what I want them to do. I tried embedding D3 code directly in the post: no luck. I tried inserting an iframe with a Neocities page containing the D3 code: no luck again. I tried asking around what other people do, and the most common answer was to use Wordpress.org. Now I am sure that has more flexibility (and thus more work) while still providing simple solutions to adding blog posts. But since this MOOC adventure got me more and more into HTML, CSS, Bootstrap (perhaps) and who knows what IN ADDITION to learning D3, I thought I might as well learn right from the basics.
So here we go, the page template has been setup (and no, that does not have my main priority nor attention as is obvious, but it does the trick so far) and I'll start creating webpages per post using Neocities.
Now what to do with listing these pages in a easily navigatable way. What's that you say? Didn't I just take a course in D3? Excellent point. So in the next week or so I'll be adding a graph showing posts ordered with the most recent on top, coloured by category and with links to the actual posts. That also allows me to keep the existing Tumblr and Wordpress posts as they are and where they are, it will provide a good exercise and it will hopefully look nice as well.
To test the theory and brainstorm ideas a bit I created the following in Tableau Public from a webscrape of my Tumblr posts (using Kimono extension for Chrome; worked quite easily and well!). If I decide to stick with the idea I hope to have the graph up before the next MOOC (Math for Journalists) and the ex-knightD3-MOOC Slack group going through the D3 In Action book start.
