bonyou blog

happy site birhday

29 may 2026, 11:50am

it is the 29th of may, meaning one year since i started my website journey!! ☆*: .｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆

which also brings us to bonyou v4!! hooray!! i've been working on it for about 2 months now, and it initially wasn't my intention to release it on the site's anniversary. however i had been putting it off for a while in those 2 months, and at some point i was like hey why dont i make this a special thing to commemorate a year of me on my site?? yay

while bonyou itself isn't technically a year old, since i only changed the domain name november last year, i think it'd be too complicated to make the distinction, so.. maybe i'll do a special birthday for bonyou when the time comes around :3c

so i wanted to look back on how my site & style has evolved over this past year! the site i started with, chromatographics (sometimes stylised as chromatographix), is still available for viewing at chromix.nekoweb.org if anyone's interested :3c

click on the images for better viewing!!

the beginning of all beginnings .. 29th may 2025, armed with only experience with table-layout webpage making and basic css properties, i set out to create .. green site. i mean the first ever chromatographics. i remember going through this w3schools javascript tutorial and becoming so excited over making an image change on button click.

not too long after in early june, chromatographics started to look a lot more put together !! i had the usb drive idea in the middle of the night and i couldn't sleep as a result of wanting really bad to work on my site ..

i drew all the images of my persona/oc, chroma, using only my finger! i resolved to not using a stylus so i could avoid entering the perfectionist mindset again, and in the end it turned out really cute and doodley which i liked a lot :3c

i also made the site background by overlaying photos i took over each other and using various blending modes on each layer, which is mainly how i make my site backgrounds now !

my main inspiration for the layout and also creating a website on nekoweb in the first place was ang and her youtube video on how she made her site! before i stumbled across her video i'd been thinking about making an artist website to host all my art, since i felt intimidated by posting on social media platforms, so i was really glad to be introduced to nekoweb through ang's video (✿◡‿◡) something i noticed was around the same time, lots of other webmasters on nekoweb were also introduced through the same way, so i think its awesome that people are discovering the joy of webcrafting ^o^

august, chromatographics v1.5!!i was messing around with hsl settings on a screenshot of the site and ended up with this cool colour palette. not much has changed layout-wise, but i'd added lots of extra stuff like a chatbox and a marquee for site neighbours!!around this time i was relatively more active within the nekoweb community and frequently left messages on lots of website's guestbooks, so i naturally accummulated lots of site buddies :-) since switching domain names i haven't done that at all, since i was afraid i was going to change my site domain again, but hopefully with the release of bonyou v4.0 i can feel more confident to reach out to more people again (≧∇≦)ﾉ watch out!!

in september i rolled out the first major layout change with the intention of making something a little less rigid than a 3-column layout, just to test my improved css skills a bit :-] tho i never really managed to complete the layout as i'd intended in the plan (right image), which was unfortunate :( i got burnt out trying to create equally complex layouts for each page, and thus quickly scrapped v2.0 and started working on a new one.. which is a pattern you'll see alot in the coming versions (ˉ▽￣～)

in october of 2025 i released the last version of chromatographics, featuring More Pngs Than Ever but also a whole lotta coolness. that's the version the site currently has now, and while it doesn't link to any pages i think it's pretty fun to click around.. i made dropdown tabs for the navigation bar and everything which i thought was really awesome

i think it was also around this time where i had a load of exams to worry about, so i didn't do much with the site at that point onwards. although if you've noticed, it actually seems like there's a new version every month.. idk what i was on tbh to be rolling out that many different site layouts

approx. one month since chromatographics' 3rd and final version, it disappeared from the face of the internet .. oo spooky except i just renamed it into ecdysis cuz (say it with me) i thought it was cool. ecdysis is basically exoskeleton shedding in invertebrates which i thought was fitting since i was sort of "discarding" chromatographics in favour of a new domain name. to a spectator, throwing away a perfectly good site to start all over again might not make a lot of sense, but if you consider it in the perspective of an artist, sometimes you need to start over on a blank canvas to move forward with new ideas

ecydsis was more of a "concept" piece rather than a personal website, inspired by point & click games and psychological horror in general.i never got very far with it though, since i didn't really have a clear objective with what i wanted to do for it. at some point i tried to repurpose it as a personal site, linking to my blog and art pages, but that didn't really spark anything interesting for me, so i abandoned it for a few weeks again.

and finally, on the 22nd of november, bonyou is born!! at the time i'd been listening to midori non stop, and as i mentioned in my site's about page and homepage, i took the name bonyou from one of their songs, bonyou vs bouyou, to represent the ordinary (bonyou means ordinary in japanese!) and sort of to tell myself that i dont need to make an extravagantly complex site. i'd also been catching up with the sakamoto days manga, so i chose to theme my site around it. and of course, i picked green as the site theme :-)

with bonyou,i learnt to use css grid which was both quite fun and hair-tearingly annoying to edit, but for the first time in months i was satisfied with what i made.i coded up a cool navigation bar with a cool subtabs feature (which i was really proud of), updated the site lots, and aside from some minor extra tweaks like making the site taller to fit more visible content, i didn't change it very much.

but alas. i am not so easily satisfied. if i were this blog would not be so long and i would not have had to take this many screenshots with the web archive, but i digress

i think bonyou v3.0 is the "bonyou-est" out of them all, as in i literally went and threw out everything except the text, which i slapped onto a green background and called it a day. no need for any boxes, borders, or whatever i was using back then!!! just simplicity and bonyou. i didn't even have to change much for a mobile layout since it was already a Tall Rectangle, sort of like.. your phone ..

but of course that was a little too simple for me, so naturally:

welcome to bonyou v4.0. my magnum opus. i started work on this around mid-april, combining a simple two column layout with colourful graphics and the funkiest colour schemes reminiscent of chromatographics. i truly cannot be more satisfied with v4.0

it would be really funny if i said sike and revealed bonyou v5.0 saying that oops i started hating v4.0 halfway through working it but no i genuinely went through with it this time. whats even better is that i actually managed to revamp several other pages as well, giving them a much needed refresh from the earlier versions of bonyou, since most of them were literally just text on a white background from its iframe days.

but yea. thats it so far. bonyou is still very young so im excited to see what more i add to it in the future!! if u read this far (or maybe u skipped, i know because id do that) we should totally trade site buttons and become buddies yo

i'll be applying for more webrings asap and then there will be a webrings page.. hooray i literally havent been in one since chromix got wiped off the face of the internet.

v4.0 is actually still a work in progress but considering my previous version releases this is already good enough. i just gotta work on the other wip pages slowly :3c

with that, there's now a page for me to document my site's evolution!!! presenting the site archive ^o^)/ its not formatted yet but. soon maybe. all the screenshots in this page are also in there so yah kewl ok thanks 4 reading stay awesome