koinuko.pink is the kind of personal website that rewards curiosity. The more you click around, the more you find, and pretty much all of it is genuinely interesting. Koinuko has been building this site since January 2021, starting out on Neocities and eventually outgrowing it, migrating to her own hosting with PHP and MySQL powering the whole thing. Five years of learning and building, and you can really feel the accumulated care in every corner.
Let me tell you what I found when I started poking around. The homepage greets you with a clean layout, a calendar of upcoming events (anime premieres, friends' birthdays, OSRS Leagues), and a running log of updates. There's a theme switcher that lets you swap between several color schemes, and Koinuko even documents which themes pass WCAG contrast checks. That kind of attention to accessibility on a personal site is something I always notice and appreciate.
The about page paints a picture of someone with wide-ranging interests: They Might Be Giants, Dorohedoro, cross-stitch, rhythm games, horror stories, language learning. She describes herself as someone who likes "dark things just as much as cute things" and notes that the intersection of both is especially fascinating to her. That sensibility runs through the whole site.
Case in point: her blog post about attending a cannibal-themed film night at a local independent coffee shop/art gallery. It's a thoughtful, well-written review of the 2023 film Cannibal Mukbang, but what really got me was the atmosphere she captures. The host offering pre-rolls, the eight-person audience, the converted house with pillows for seating. It's the kind of writing that makes you feel like you were there.
Then you click over to the page about her cat Espie (short for Salt and Pepper, or S-P) and it's just pure sweetness. The kitten eats beets and pears, attacks the faucet, and only meows at night. The whole page exists just because Koinuko loves her cat and wanted to tell you about her. That's exactly the kind of thing a personal website should have.
The technical side of the site is impressive too. She built her own PHP calendar script and put it on GitHub. She wrote a detailed blog post about FreeDNS, a service that lets you claim free subdomains on donated domains, complete with a practical walkthrough of the risks and setup process. She's experimented with XMPP and set up her own IRC chatroom. This is someone who genuinely enjoys tinkering with web technologies and sharing what she learns.
I loved browsing her old layouts page, which documents the visual evolution of the site from V1 through V6. She's honest and funny about her earlier work ("the way I coded this was like actually atrocious") and you can see a real progression in skill and design sensibility over time. The current layout is clean and readable, a big departure from the early days of Hello Kitty everywhere and massive link lists.
The askbox is a nice touch, too. The handful of comments there give you a sense of the kind of community that forms around sites like this. One message from a high schooler who found the site and says it "carried me through a lot of boredom" is particularly sweet. Koinuko's response is genuine and warm without being performative.
She also runs several subdomains and side projects: a fanlisting collective, a self-insert homepage, an Elusive Samurai fan site, and kyaa.fun for interactive tools and scripts. There's a translations section, a recipes page, a library and bibliography section. The site just keeps going.
If you're the kind of person who likes to explore a personal site the way you'd explore a friend's bookshelf, pulling things out, flipping through them, finding unexpected surprises, koinuko.pink is going to keep you busy for a while. Go click around and see what you find.