About

Information about this site and its creator.

About This Site

This website is hosted on Neocities and was launched as karithina.neocities.org on 1 January 2022 (not even a placeholder date, literally the first day of the year). The site name was originally Karithina’s Nostalgia Hole (KNH).

I created 4o4 originally as a place to host my Creatures mods that wasn’t my boring corporate Squarespace at the time and it’s grown into an expression of my love for the personal web over time.

4o4.au was registered a couple of months later on 24 March 2022, after the release of .au domains. I renamed the site to 4o4.

In October 2024 I started using a static site generator (Hugo) for the first time!

I’m slowly working toward absorbing every other place I’ve scattered my work into this one site.

You can follow site updates via:

Accessibility Information

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA.

This page contains information about this website’s accessibility goals. If you’d like to learn more about accessibility, I recommend the W3C’s Accessibility Fundamentals Overview as a starting point.

I strongly believe that creating with accessibility in mind helps to make the world better for everyone.

In every step of my website I aim to align with the guidelines, including:

progress toward alignment to the WCAG 2.1 AAA standard
use of a readable font (Atkinson Hyperlegible)
breadcrumb trail is included to navigate back home, as though you are Hansel and Gretel in the woods but nobody has eaten the beadcrumbs
site map is included
avoiding fully-aligned and center-aligned text
avoiding chunks of italic text
distracting gifs are on select pages with a warning
responsive design across all devices
colour contrast to a WCAG 2.1 AAA rating
no autoplaying video or audio, and in fact no background audio at all
links and headings make sense out of context, and avoid terms such as 'click here'
colour and direction is not the only way of conveying information, such as avoiding 'the red box' or 'see below' as a way to describe a subject
alt text for all images, even describing decorational images as art is important content itself
logical flow aligning to correct HTML structure including descriptive headings in an organised hierachy
definitions for any abbreviations used
language tags used where languages other than Australian English have been utilised
tables use a summary and are used for data not layout
for website navigation, text is not 'baked in' to raster images. This allows for translation, increase of text size, and use of screen readers to allow users to navigate the website with greater ease.

Technologies Used

I aim to build this website from a strong foundation, and so it has been built primarily with HTML and CSS.

While I attempt to limit use of JavaScript on this website, some has been used for features such as the style switcher on the Settings page.

No ARIA is better than bad ARIA, and so I have also kept it to a minimum and instead utilising a better core structure.

Privacy Information

Where possible I’ve limited or completely removed any user tracking.

Currently I believe I’m not using any third-party user tracking technology on the core pages of my site, however if you notice anything I have missed, please feel free to contact me.

This is with the exception of any pages that include an embedded YouTube video, of which there is currently one page (a memorial to my mother). I’m working toward an alternative.

Website Buttons

These are buttons specifically relating to this website. For more buttons, visit the buttons page:

Credits

This site was built by a human with the use of:

Blacklight – For testing that my site is giving you privacy.
Cascadia Code – A font designed by Aaron Bell. I'm using this for most of the website now because it fit my requirements for readability, flexibility, nostalgia, and ability for creation of ASCII art.
CSS – What did we ever do before CSS, I adore it so much.
Deploy to Neocities – I deploy to NeoCities via GitHub, via Hugo haha
Freezeframe.js – A script to enable stopping and starting animations in a few ways.
Freezeframe Implementation Tutorial by Bechno Kid – I used this to understand where to start with Freezeframe.
GitHub – So far I only use GitHub for deploying to Neocities.
HTML – HTML is the structure that holds us all together in this bold world of tubes.
Hugo – Building with Hugo has been saving me so much time and error duplicating my handcoded work across every page every time I change my mind.
Humans.txt – Humans.txt is an initiative for knowing the people behind a website, because we are people, not machines.
JavaScript – I have used JavaScript in a limited amount, but some things I still can't do without it. I currently use it for styleswitcher and freezeframe.
Markdown – I mainly use HTML but using a little bit of Markdown as a treat here and there has made writing a lot more relaxing, even if I can't do much more complicated work with it yet.
Neocities – Hosting on Neocities and seeing how everyone interacts here is giving me hope for the future of the internet every day. This is a community that's made me who I am today.
Photoshop – I make and/or edit all my graphics with Photoshop. Maybe I'll move to a replacement one day.
Styleswitcher – This Styleswitcher by Kale was what motivated me to move to a static site generator as I couldn't be bothered pasting another script to every single page of my site.
Visual Studio Code – I've been using Visual Studio since high school so I'm pretty comfortable with it.