So...I just realised this week that pidgeons haven't been working LOL...I usually check the generation weekly from an admin page that shows me all of them at once, so I can tell if they're not generating properly, but a change I made some time ago to remove some pages that weren't needed apparently broke the gachapon machine...I didn't know until I went to click it recently. It's working again now.

Also, the Yesterweb webring has been defunct for a bit, and I never got down to removing the link. It's removed now.

And and I also updated the kiriban number again (someday perhaps someone will catch it).

That's all for now!

Update jumpscare!!!

I have like 5 million things that I want to work on at any given moment, but today I felt like coding, so I sat down to do some things that have been bugging me for a bit. Full changelog:

• Project pages on the "plain" view have been added.
  • These are now entirely browsable I think. The only real thing that's missing from the plain view is the guestbook, which I ran out of time to implement.
  • I also think that maybe I should change the page background colour because it's...very...bright.
  • I don't know if I'll implement the other pages. I think maybe Firelizards because it's a chance to make something that looks period-accurate...but otherwise, this is pretty much it - a barebones version of my site that does not use Javascript and looks ok on mobile.
• On the main site, project/media log explorer windows no longer group by year.
  • I originally felt this was necessary because the sidebar felt kind of empty, but as the years go on and I don't really update THAT much, it just adds extra fluff and makes me feel bad about not updating, which is not the point of this website.
• Project pages now display the date of creation/last update in the top right under the breadcrumbs.
  • I'm not sure why I didn't do this before
• Log images now show earliest upload first
  • Previously they showed latest first, similar to the picture gallery page, but when looking through my photos I felt this was kind of counterintuitive to the browsing experience.
• Fixes for the image overlay when viewing images
  • Fixed bug with showing the full text of an image in the overlay if text contained double quotes. Amateur mistake
  • Show image title if a title is given
  • Some layout tweaks for better readability when the image is small, and also when there's a lot of text
• Miscellaneous small changes
  • Updated the kiriban number (thus far no one has emailed me about catching it...)
  • Added a button for Palestine aid resources

With that, it'll probably be a while before I add anything new again. That said, I've always been thinking of corow.net, and one of my current major long-term projects is an addition to this site. I'm grappling with the idea of keeping it a secret when the point of this website is so that I can share updates, but it's always been an issue balancing motivation and secrets for me...something about posting something publicly externalises the reward mechanism and makes my internal satisfaction stop working...so I understand devs who never share updates about their projects. At least no one is expecting anything from me, so there isn't like, kickstarter backer pressure or anything. (I have been keeping a private devlog though, so maybe someday, when I'm ready to put it here, I can also import the entire devlog as a project + logs.)

Oh, and also - since ditching deviantART, I've been feeling the inconvenience of not having an art gallery/portfolio. I've been thinking I should make one, but I'm not sure what kind of setup would be both fun and convenient to work with - my private collection of WIPs and whatevers is simply a Guilded forum where I toss a new post whenever I feel like, but that's not a great archive. I guess that's a design problem for me to ponder...

Incidentally, does anyone else also dislike the whole trend of art gallery websites looking like Instagram feeds? I have not migrated to a new art site because I absolutely hate browsing art on timelines - my ideal is the old deviantART way of sending new notifs when art is posted and being able to look through thumbnails before clicking through. Secondarily, the Pixiv way of just showing a page of thumbnails. I think only Toyhouse does this now, and it's not even that kind of art gallery site.

Maybe it's just because it's quicker for me to browse = less time wasted scrolling just to see everything I missed, maybe it's because I hate the pressure of knowing every single picture I post is being put front and centre on someone's feed...I'm still waiting for a new art gallery platform that gives space for people to post "scraps". I think it's so important to have the space to make and show things that aren't Instagram ideals...but I guess that's easy to say as someone who isn't trying to turn a profit on such a site that will have a majority of free users. Until someone else agrees and builds their own gallery site on these principles, I can only build my own...

Unrelatedly, this week's batch of firelizards is number 100. It seems that two white firelizards (1% chance to generate one) generated in this batch!! Woah!!

If you have (regrettably) been on social media recently (like, the past day or so), then you will probably have seen some posts about turning on a setting to "Prevent third-party sharing for (blog name)" on Tumblr, in relation to scraping data for training AI models. (Example here, extremely poorly received staff post here.) You know...the same old thing: opt-out of having your data sold as fodder for the machine because the company stands by "protecting user choice", etc. On top of that the data seems to have been handled extremely poorly (source: Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools; a section is screenshotted here if you don't want to log in).

I'm tired, and reading anything about the scraping of social media posts for AI makes me mad, so I'm not going to talk about that. All I can do is wearily try to protect this website - emphasis on "try" - so today's update is really just that. I've updated robots.txt to block major AI crawlers and also added a couple of meta tags. For reference, here are the articles I looked at for that:

• How to block AI Crawler Bots using robots.txt file - has the most comprehensive list of user agents to block, I think
• How to Block AI from Scraping Your Content - using a meta tag to stop Bing Chat from using the page, nosnippet for blocking Google SGE
• Google-Extended does not stop Google Search Generative Experience from using your site’s content - bit more info about SGE not being specifically blockable
• Block AI Crawlers: Here’s How To Stop Your Site From Being Used for AI Training (OpenAI and Google Bard Guide) - mentions using Google Search Console to force Googlebot to re-crawl for the updated robots.txt file; I think this is only necessary if Google has already indexed your website

A small personal website that isn't even indexed on Google is probably not very likely to get crawled for AI...but let's just say I'm doing it because I'm annoyed and tired. I want to make things without having to worry about...all this...and I can't imagine how much worse it is for people whose livelihoods are at stake here. Stay strong and stay safe, friends.

Nothing amazing - just a few tiny things:

• Added a link to my links page on the splash page
• Added a couple of social media links to the About page and fixed my FFXIV home world since I moved to Behemoth recently
  • Speaking of which, I should probably put up a media log for FFXIV

I've always had a mobile-compatible page on the backburner...but honestly I detest designing for mobile compatibility because it's annoying. I dislike browsing websites on mobile. Anything that can be done on mobile I would rather do on desktop, and anything that is mobile exclusive simply doesn't exist to me. It feels to me like a symptom of capitalism in ways that I don't really want to end up ranting about for several paragraphs in a website update. But I also understand that it's an accessibility issue - having a phone is more essential than having a computer these days, so having some form of my website be accessible from mobile (as opposed to completely inaccessible when the screen is too small) is ideal.

That said, this website is my house on the Internet, so to speak, so I get to deprive mobile users of rights if I want. I've added a "plain" version of well...parts of my site...and it's linked from the splash page. Not all of it has been done yet (notably, the projects/media log pages are still not done) and I don't know when I'll get down to that, and also I won't be making all pages available on the plain version (maybe I'll do a period-accurate page for the firelizards specifically if I ever do add that though). I know it's extremely petty, and I DO have the capability to make things look better, but whatever. No display issues whatsoever AND it doesn't have any Javascript!

Not a site update per se, but due to many unfortunate events on Twitter I felt I needed to prepare for the worst and sign up for a bunch of other social media accounts (which I keep forgetting about anyway, and hence haven't really updated, but...) and collate them in a links page. Which, well--sure, carrd and linktr.ee exist, but why bother when I have (gestures) THIS?

Anyway, here it is: https://links.corow.net/

In other news, there aren't any other project updates because I actually...haven't worked out how to post art and life updates here (or if I want to, in the case of life updates) whoops. They will just go into the corownet logs I guess: I've been obsessing over the idea of buying myself an electric guitar, a dream that I've had for maybe about 15+ years now, and only just realised I have the money and minimal amount of storage space to get one. Which has cascaded into a lot of extra costs, so now I'm drawing a lot of adoptables in the hopes that I might be able to earn enough to cover the spending. I'll probably make a project page for the adopts later when I'm ready to display them (and then write a whole lot of alt text...). I...don't know how to make "electric guitar" a project, however - maybe I should look into coding upload/display for audio media since I have other plans for that too.

(It's hard to not feel like I should meticulously dress up all the info I'm sharing here, care about metrics or whatever junk the social media companies want us to care about etc. etc. etc. but I suppose I'm trying to feel it's ok to update a lot sometimes and then make no updates for months on end. This (infrequent updates) is more like how it should go though, I guess.)

Back to corownet after a week of doing merch artwork - it's actually more like 2 weeks now. Always feels weird going between art and coding, so I tend to always do one and neglect the other for long stretches of time...

Anyway, I made a new template by modifying the default one (mono). I'm not entirely sure what all these variables are (haven't gone into the backend code to look) and the indentation is, to put it lightly, not very existent...so getting it all cleaned up is a bit time-consuming. BUT I think I managed to have it looking cleaner! (Also woah I didn't know they got ShiPainter to work...please I would like to have ShiPro my beloved back...)

It's a bit of a cross between nostalgic BBS Note and Wacintaki...I actually thought of putting the navigation on a header nav at the very top of the page like the latter, but personally I wanted the top part of my board to be more open. I think I could make maybe 2 or so variants on the layout once I'm done wrangling the basics...

It's still not done yet - there are some half-finished pages, I'm making some design decisions on the commenting form/response pages, will probably do some language editing on the oekaki app instructions...possibly see if I can get the edit form working in a more intuitive way...and then work on colour schemes (I'm a little unsure, but I think I might be able to use CSS custom properties to make custom colour schemes possible to do without SASS)...and then do my own personal customisations. It's all very jank because I'm not really keeping track of which vars are available when, and I'm doing my best to separate bits out so I can reuse code...but I do plan to release this and possibly a couple of other similar themes on Github, since there aren't that many themes available for poti-kai especially after the conversion to BladeOne.

Also: I kind of want to see if I can hack the blank redirection page that shows after something is posted, so a dark mode theme could remain in dark mode...

Completely unrelatedly my 100th visitor kiriban was missed!!! The new one is 200!!!

Now that the new week has rolled over, pidgeons are now up! Unlike firelizards, past batches of pidges aren't viewable. This is mostly because I'm feeling lazy.

It seems like there's a high chance of colour remapping glitching out on the outline when pidges are generated individually, so I think I might have to permanently fix it (layer the lineart in black on top of generated pidges). Unfortunate, because I liked the rare weird pidge, but they're no longer rare like this...

The page layout is inspired by wikified horrors (SCP, Backrooms). There IS lore behind this that's related to one of my OCs, but actually I made up most of the content on the spot, so I can't really talk about it...other than that, I'm quite proud of the gacha machine art and the combination of pixel art/css animation. 

I haven't on anything else site-related, so that's all for this update. Busy busy...

Pleased to announce that pidgeons are DONE........but due to the way I have it set up, I can only put it up next week. The rolling generation is done, and so is the page. Maybe a bit less fancy than I originally intended, but I suppose if I ever feel like giving it an overhaul I can always do that.

There are still a couple of things I'd like to do that are pidgeon-related, but they're on the backburner for now while I think about how I want to implement those. Next up I think I'll be plugging away at that oekaki skin, probably. And more desktop icons maybe...

Thinking also that the year grouping of projects/media doesn't really cut it because it'll get really long after a few years and feels really redundant before enough years have passed, so I kind of want to do some tweaks to the display. Much to think about...

Oh, and I got approved for the Yesterweb Ring. If you came from there: hello!!!

Joined a couple of webrings. A little nervous about having strangers on my site, but I will get used to it probably...................?

Set up an oekaki board on a subdomain. I actually got a little distracted and started writing a new skin for it - the standard POTI-board layout isn't really to my taste and the theme I used on a previous board isn't compatible with the new templating engine. (The upside is that the new templating engine is exactly the one I use all the time, so I don't foresee many difficulties. I'll probably be working on that after the pidgeon stuff is done.

Speaking of pidgeons - I spent a lot of time preparing page text and layout graphics and haven't actually started working on the layout code yet.........next week I guess.........this one was REALLY hard to design and I still have yet to code the rolling generation, so it might just end up being another couple of weeks before it's fully complete. But at least I have the design done I GUESS. 

Apart from that, did some minor organisation of links, added some more new ones, and added the ability to..........not link. Just so I can create headers...

Added WebSameGame! This was a small game script that I first saw on a Japanese artist's Digimon/art website (possibly Trouble Tamers?) and really wanted to set up on my own, but knew nothing about hosting CGI scripts and how to read Japanese. So it was a buried childhood dream, sort of, to have this up someday with custom graphics...and it was really surprisingly easy to put it up, much more so than I thought it was as a kid. Of course, I haven't actually swapped out the graphics yet, but that will be Coming Soon™.

The website is no longer up, but the Internet Archive still has it and the download intact. I don't know Perl, but it's easy enough to make simple modifications, so I translated the text, tweaked a few things and so on. I might write setup instructions, but I can't distribute the modified code.

Besides that, fiddled with the splash page and the welcome page a little. I do intend to join some webrings later, so I wanted to make sure I had some space set aside for them. (Hopefully my merch shop self-promotion doesn't break any rules re: selling stuff? I feel it doesn't go against the spirit, but I am always nervous.) I have a lot of mixed feelings about explaining what "kiriban" means...uh...I hope I'm not TOO old. It's not THAT old of a concept, is it???

I was REALLY hoping to get the pidge page done but spent the entire day pixelling the gacha machine graphic I needed (and tweaking the animation) but at least next week...I'll probably actually get to work on it...???

Made a bunch of graphics, mostly icons, with the aim of "baseline completion". I'm not satisfied with all of these, particularly the links one - I know it's shaded badly, but I couldn't get the colours to work to begin with, so I might have to try drawing something else. I do intend to replace a few of these others eventually - mainly the projects and media log folders, because those are extremely vanilla and boring. Consistency in style is definitely a problem here because sometimes I feel like putting outlines on pixels and sometimes I don't...hopefully the palette carries it and it isn't too noticeable.

I'm still missing a desktop background because I'm not entirely sure what to draw for it...it will most likely be tiled, but tiled backgrounds are REALLY hard to draw. I guess I'll think about it for a while.

Also, shuffled some of the links around. I don't really want to duplicate links in the Start menu in case it makes people overlook other links in the menu, but the menu panel doesn't look good if it's too short...so I think I might add a changelog that links here...I also still have a downloads page to make, so that's another item.

Besides that, also added a counter. FC2 has such a wide variety of counters that it's hard to decide even though I was already set on a specific look! 

It feels weird thinking about this as being an entire website that people can visit in this state. I'm afraid of losing interest in working on it...but I would still like to tell my friends...so I think I'd have to come up with ways to trick myself into thinking this is still totally under construction haha. Maybe the site will be considered "finished" when I do a wallpaper and replace the link icon...

Fixed some issues with pages bumping when I don't really want them to - think I should make an "updated" indicator because the "new" indicator isn't exactly correct.

Mostly worked on pidges though! I think next week I will be actually hooking up the pidge generation and making pidges available for adoption.

Got a lot of art to do, I think...

I didn't really feel like working on downloads (again)...and anyway I'm not on a deadline or anything so I worked on pidges instead. Fixed a number of bugs, though! I've also added a single website button...I would like to draw a few more.

Next week I think I'll continue working on pidges, but more on the site side. Maybe? I do want to generate eggs for them too, though, so maybe I'll end up doing image generation again...

I do want to open corownet up for visitors but there's still a bunch left to do, and to be honest, I'm afraid of calling it done, because that's the point where I'm going to say ok I don't have to think about this for a while and then forget it exists haha. It's a problem because I'd like to work on other projects, but not be gone so long that I can't get back to updating the site...

Ok, I didn't actually get much done this week because I was distracted. More on that later.

• Fixed clicking on folders in the explorer window - due to some changes they stopped working but they're now good
• Log links now jump to the correct log on the page, and will even open on the correct page if it's beyond the first page
• Added highlights for projects - will go through and add some later
• Added random projects - this doesn't actually immediately open a new project, but pulls a random few projects to click on. I thought it was more fun this way (and also, just easier to do)
• Added a bunch of links over the week
• Some minor fixes on the admin end of things

So in order to fill out the links page, I've been browsing around to collect links and buttons. It's nice to discover new personal homepages and...I kind of wish I could do this a little more guilt-free (from not doing all the other things I should be working on) haha. A lot of these are hosted on Neocities, no surprise...but it feels a little social media-y in the sense that...I don't really know how to word this, but quite a number of sites link specifically to other Neocities sites/reference features that Neocities specifically provides (e.g. mutual follows, comments, updates etc.). That's cool, but the centralisation of both the sites and the community kind of scares me. The thought sort of sits in the back of my head, like, will people find and visit my non-Neocities site? Should I make an additional splash page on Neocities that points here?

And then: Is being seen the point, actually? I'm already deriving a ton of enjoyment from just making stuff, and a lot of that comes from being able to make some poor decisions without being seen. I don't like modern social media because it feels like performing my existence all the time - I don't even tweet when I don't think anyone's going to react to something I say, and when I do and no one does, I just feel sort of embarrassed, like, that was a display of emotion that could've stayed in my brain actually. The potential of receiving feedback makes the lack of feedback exist and I hate that.

tl;dr not to say that I don't want to be perceived, but I don't want it to get to the point where I'm doing more to fit in with other people than for myself, I guess? And I'm constantly debating over where that line is.

Anyway, I've been thinking about that oekaki board project I've temporarily shelved but intend to work on. Today I was surprised to find that Wacintaki Poteto updated this year. It officially supports ChickenPaint now, which is a relatively new drawing app. It kind of diminishes the need for me to build a new board type, but I think my project has its niche...I was thinking of something more resource-heavy than Wacintaki and POTI-board (maybe I should write a dive page on oekaki boards), and could probably implement this as an oekaki package. The actual purpose here is to build an extension for Lorekeeper so that the site can host oekaki boards, which I've always thought were a perfect fit for ARPGs. And of course...host it here too.

I was going to write some notes about implementing PaintBBS NEO in Wacintaki (which I did successfully earlier) but this would probably take a lot more words than I have in me right now. I think oekaki boards should come back and Neocities cannot host them with the features they make available to users.

Anyway, for now - thinking I will consolidate the tools and toys into a download page, which I need to design. There are a bunch more art resources I need to make and some existing pages to pretty up. I tend to lose steam nearing the end of a project, but I hope that doesn't happen because I still do intend to make more stuff after this...

I did in fact build out the links management system I mentioned last week. Just as well, because this layout would've been such a pain to manage manually!! These systems kind of bother me because changes are saved immediately (as opposed to saving a draft and publishing) and knowing that there are people who might catch mistakes before I do is one of the things that usually scares me off social media after a while. I think it's worth it for the cleaner code, though...

It's themed on Google Sheets - no particular reason, just had the idea and went for it. Getting the borders and etc. lined up was a pain, so that's why the scrollbar is always displayed. Something I think about while making these "looks like x thing" layouts (like the project explorer/project pages) is the balance between adding unnecessary/distracting fluff vs. the minimum needed to resemble the layout vs. tweaks to bring the viewer's eye to where I want them to look.

So unnecessary fluff would be the f(x) icon and the bottom left icons, which mean and do nothing...the second line under the title isn't that necessary content-wise, but that line would normally be occupied by the File, Edit etc. menus, and there needs to be text there. I decided against doing the icon menu because that would be too much unnecessary fluff, but felt the function bar was kind of necessary. So on and so forth - it just really needs only the positioning of elements, but not the exact text and functions to be recognisable, I think. Then on top of that - because a lot of the visual fluff doesn't really help with reading, I lower the contrast for the unimportant bits. Tweaking all this stuff is where most of the time goes...but I'm quite satisfied with how this page turned out.

Unrelatedly I made the desktop icons smaller and properly pixelled them - very happy with how the Cove one turned out. Thinking about how to illustrate the other two desktop icons, and the start menu icons...

I'll still need to fill in the manually edited parts of the page and enter a bunch more links, but otherwise, I think I have just the downloads page left...? And a bunch of graphics to do, miscellaneous decoration etc. I think this will always be a work in progress but it'll be at a point where I'm satisfied enough to show people, I think!

After a week of hardcore merch art grinding I'm back to working on corownet!

I've been wanting to add an RSS feed, but couldn't really decide on how/what to put in it - page updates are separate from logs so combining them into a single feed requires a bit of messing around, and if I kept them separate, maybe it's weird to mix project logs and media logs...?? In the end I decided to separate it into 3 different feeds. I made the RSS icon myself because I couldn't track down the source of those pixel RSS feed buttons but I wonder if it's too small...In any case, I'm also not sure how I feel about it querying on every hit so tentatively I'm caching the results - basically it should update the results every 24 hours. There's no point in checking more than once a day.

I still don't actually know if this is a great way to keep track of updates, primarily because I'm not sure what constitutes an "update". To me it's when the codebase gets updated, but thinking about it more, shouldn't it be when any content is added? So initially I didn't think pages needed a feed, but those are not insignificant changes to the site even if I don't document them here in the corownet logs. Living with big social media kind of does that to a person, I guess - a new thing is only important if it updates the entire platform. Everything else is just "content". I'm not great at making "content" consistently, because I'm conditioned to think that it's all going to be forgotten anyway. Platform changes stay. "Content" doesn't. My thoughts, my feelings, my voice have no impact...and so I pour my soul into the platform to leave a mark on the world. There's little left to put into making art. ...And so I've been doing my best to avoid calling the things people make "content", and trying to believe there's a point in talking about my thoughts. Maybe something I write on here might be important to someone else...and so I invite you to subscribe to my feeds.

Back to the update - I also added a help window. This thing is a helper I knew I needed fairly early on because it's totally possible to get windows stuck/inaccessible, and I didn't really want to fiddle with making a custom right click menu to close/restore windows and such. Fairly simple stuff.

I'm still thinking on the links page - I've been hoarding links like shinies since I started paying attention to needing to put together a list, so there's quite a fair bit of stuff and I haven't had any layout ideas yet. But I'm considering...building yet another system for me to quick add links without touching the code.......LOL. I might actually do it??

Completely unrelatedly, sometime during this week I had a dream where I was sent back in time (a one-way trip) to prevent a crisis. I thought I'd get sent back to 2016 but I got sent to 2006 instead, and my immediate regret was that I hadn't backed up corownet and would have to recode from scratch. Worse, it was way too far in the past, and I wouldn't be able to make it in the same state because the tech didn't exist...so it would be years and years until I could rebuild a working version of the site...it was sad...

This is like the one thing I look forward to working on every week LOL.

The guestbook's moderation tools are done but I ended up not doing the layout element rearrangement because it'd take more time than it's worth. Might do it in the future if it REALLY bothers me, but I don't think anyone's going to linger on the guestbook page that much...probably. What I DID do is pagination, though! It will be a while before it becomes necessary at all, but better to do it before I forget.

No new pages, but I gave the project pages an overhaul (and learnt about CSS custom properties) - the old layout wasn't designed at all and was OK for a while...until I tried to name a page "Ori and the Blind Forest" and found that it Did Not Fit. The dropdown bar was surprisingly hard to work out, due to some caching issues (the back/forward/refresh buttons currently do nothing because I couldn't work out the back/forward buttons)...and I think the updated layout...might be a little less easy to figure out hierarchically but I tried. Please click for more pages.

Aside from that, gave in and converted a bunch of fonts to MS system fonts with embedded bitmaps (i.e. mostly MS PGothic). The slight blurriness was really bothering me. Put in the Start menu, though I'm still waffling on the items to put in the list...and finally the little start bar icons. It really looks more complete with these in...I actually clicked my own start bar icon instead of the website's start icon a couple of times in development. Definitely still got quite a fair bit of art to make (cursing the fact that I decided to go with the 1:1 pixel ratio instead of a 1:2 ratio bc there's so much canvas space to fill) but the more stuff goes in, the better it looks.

Right now the remaining pages (minimum) would be links, credits, tools and toys. Plus a small help page for retrieving lost windows. I think I'll do the links and credits next week, since I definitely have enough material to fill out those pages...

Made an About page which ironically doesn't have a lot of info about me. I think it's really hard to talk about myself because I'm always worried about sounding self-absorbed (especially since I tend to define myself in terms of work/skills) haha...

I also made a guestbook! It's half-complete at this time; it works and it's styled but I'm planning to rearrange the layout elements so that posting doesn't reload the entire window, and need to finish my moderation tools. I considered getting an external guestbook but honestly...I just wanted to make it myself LOL.

Struggled a fair bit with this layout because the transparent parts didn't go very well with such a contrasting background, but I really wanted to use this picture. My friends and I climbed Mt. Inari in 2017 and I took this photo then...at Yotsutsuji we were tired, it was getting late, and the mosquitoes were biting, but we decided to go for the summit because we were there, and who knows when we'd ever have a chance to do the climb again? I think it was worth it, and it's one of the memories I think of when I'm trying to decide whether to go for an experience I normally wouldn't try.

The About layout background is the view from Yokohama Landmark Tower in 2018 - it's unfortunately obscured by my profile image, but that day there was a large thunderhead cloud on the horizon (I remember Twitter users joking that it must've been the location of Laputa). It was summer, a perfect summer's day, and I was out with my friend who wanted to see the sea. I don't really have any deep comments on this; it was just a really beautiful day. One of my favourite memories.

There are other stories to be had about the little rectangular photos I put on the About page, but maybe I'll talk about them next time :)

Sometimes I can't remember whether I did something this week or the previous...a lot of this week's stuff isn't front-facing.

• Got TinyMCE working in the correct place so I'm using it now!
• More management stuff for projects - almost entirely done now and for practical purposes I probably won't actually need to build out the rest?
• Some styling - fancy scrollbars, put in some temporary images...I'm having trouble deciding on what exactly I want to draw for the icons, so just put out whatever I thought of first, I can do proper ones later
• Added a fancy header to the welcome page! It's also still WIP
• Added a few new pages (Tools, Toys, Links). I'm undecided on how to style these - they could be more interesting, but I'm too used to the minimalistic clean modern look and can't quite think of good layouts. In time, I guess?

Next round...if I feel up to it I can finish up the rest of my management tools but honestly my interest in decking this out is kind of waning lol. I think it'd be nice to build out the start menu and style my pages, maybe? Tools-wise, I think I'd like to build a self-hosted guestbook too...

Lots of stuff done today:

• The tweaks mentioned yesterday to open new windows to specific pages/logs page
• On my side, I shifted most editing features into my admin panel - initially I wanted to have them sort of integrated into the content when I'm logged in, but it somewhat limits what I can do with the layout. This was the bulk of today's work and a huge pain. There's still some more to go, but at least it's fairly smooth sailing.
• Some of the stats (image/log counters) weren't counting correctly, so fixed that
• Also on my side, but implemented TinyMCE as a text editor because I keep having to type paragraph tags. Ironically I forgot to put it in for log creation so I still have to type them for this entry.
• Some other stuff for my editing convenience. Logs are also now editable (finally) - next I'll be doing editing of images, and then the ability to delete stuff, and then this stuff is more or less done unless I want to soup it up some more.

I decided to use Tailwind early on so I could learn how to use it, but it's kind of backfiring because I need components sometimes, and it's not nearly as convenient as Bootstrap when I want to do that. On one hand, it's made it easier for me to do a more customised layout, but on the other...I have to make components when I want them, or fight with the styling on third party components...

Added latest updates to the welcome page for desktop. I should probably think of how to share content with the regular view so I'm not making 5000 pages repeatedly...

I'm wondering if it looks too busy, but it's really not that much - new pages, and new project/media logs. They can't open new windows directly to the specified pages/logs yet because I don't have the routes defined...thinking about how I might do that...maybe URL params. I think there are a few ways I could make page creation more streamlined as well...

It's all very nitpicky stuff though - I think I should be working on rounding out the project management system and starting on other parts of the site but it's so boringgggg now that the stuff creation is done. Need to make graphics too.

It has been a couple of weeks but back on this train. For now. (Getting busy with other things, like prepping for my next shop update...)

I didn't really feel like doing any heavy duty coding this week but wanted to do something, so I styled the project viewer pages. This turned out to be mostly finding and throwing in a bunch of new pixel fonts - internally I'm like "this is probably really poor design" but you know what? It's really hard to find pixel fonts in specific sizes that match. If I really wanted this to look coherent I'd have to design a typeface and pixel it in several different sizes (currently I'm using 12, 14, 26px sizes, and it's hard to find pixel fonts in the larger sizes). I think my Times New Roman variants all came from BitFontMaker2 - even made an altered version of one myself so that I can have a less blurry bolded version. Here's a demo:

THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG
the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Font woes aside, the logs page looks a lot nicer and easier to read :) Not sure how I feel about this styling yet, but at least there's spacing and pages for images and logs. It actually feels usable as a site now, but of course I still have a lot of things to add.

Added image uploads and cropping! To match the look of the desktop, I made it so that the thumbnail crop would generate a second, crispier thumbnail (using Imagick's quantize function to bring down the colour count to 8, plus dithering).

Also hastily threw together a project page so I could view it and see the image gallery (Magnific Popup) in action. The file organisation is honestly a complete mess right now despite my best efforts to keep it contained and my memory isn't good enough to keep track of all these files...

I'm still thinking about the layout...at the moment I think it would be nice to have a proper header font because the pixel resolution is 1:1 for everything EXCEPT the headers and it bothers me. Not that I dislike big pixels (I love big pixels) but it doesn't really...go? I've also been thinking a lot about another feature I want to do that involves image generation...but I think that should have its own project page, and it'll probably be a while before I get to start on that.

I thought I'd power through more updates today, but actually I've been really sleepy, so didn't get that much done.

For now I've got the window creation from inside an iframe done, which means page navigation is taken care of entirely. I shouldn't have any more complicated hyperlink magic to do. Fixed up the media log as well and prettified a bit (getting very fond of making dither pattern graphics)...I need a bigger font for large text but can't really find one I want to use, so might have to make it myself.

Which brings us to projects - I wanted to make at least a project viewing page first, but couldn't decide on a layout. Did the simple things - creating/editing pages, some prepping of the backend work. I'll have to sit down to work out the image stuff this weekend...I am always thankful when I can crop images on upload but hate having to implement this.

Every day I work on this I stray further and further from the original intention...I mean it's fun and the result is pretty cool so it's, well, ok maybe?

In the past few days I've got the windows working better - was trying to see how far I could go without jQuery but alas I am reliant on jQuery. It did make the whole window dragging thing much easier to do, though, and I put in a fix for the drag stuttering when the cursor goes over the window page. Also pulled in some fonts.

Currently I'm working on the project browser - next step is to pop open windows from inside the frame. I definitely think the project browser queries are extremely inefficient so I'm thinking about how I might rework that and the tables...but tbh it's such a small site that I don't think that's going to be a major issue. My bigger concern is whether this is going to be too inaccessible to use...which means...I'm going to have to make an alternate, less JS-heavy layout (though honestly this isn't that much JS...) that can also somehow work on mobile...I don't know if that's any more effort than I'm putting into this, but I'm not enthusiastic about mobile.

For now, though, just working on getting the flow of project browsing (and by extension the media log) up. Then, back to tools for editing projects/uploading images, until this is complete enough for me to use. Then the commissions system, then I can finally focus on filling out pages (though I might do some pages in between for variety).

I meant to continue getting projects and etc. working but...I got brainworms from browsing old web/web 1.0 themed sites and dreamt up a particular layout, and I really REALLY wanted to get to work on it immediately. So I tinkered with the frontend, and worked out some solutions - even though this is retro-themed, there's going to be a fair chunk of JS I'll have to write to get it to behave the way I expect it to, and some...interesting...things to work around circumventing unexpected behaviour.

The tl;dr of it is:

• I intend to replicate a windows circa 95 desktop with openable windows, with different window styles
• The thing is that I also want to be able to link specific pages within my site without it breaking...
• This means that 1. the page will have to detect if it's inside an iframe, 2. redirect to the "desktop" and open a "window" (which contains an iframe) that opens the desired page. (I don't know how the back button will work w/ multiple iframes on the page though)
• If I have multiple window styles, how do I tell the code which type of window to use? I have some ideas but it's fairly clunky, and I haven't tested them.
• Windows should become active when you click on them. This involves some z-index management. I'd also like if the tab title could show the active window title...
• Because this isn't annoying enough, I also want to be able to minimise windows. I'll be nice to myself and not consider the possibility of people opening 5000 windows. Or maybe I won't, and implement a hard limit on the max number of windows openable, and pop up an error message if there are too many...
• I would LOVE to have theme/wallpaper changing...but that's something I can think about later on.
• One of the things I really want to replicate is the chromeless windows that were all the rage back then...but funnily enough there are no screenshots of it, which sucks because it doesn't work any more. I've tried my best to do it from memory and by examining the JS code, and I think it's decent.
• Added on SVG buttons so I can do custom recolours dynamically. I think the whole bar actually changed colours on drag and it was the button lines that changed colours on hover...making the button lines turn white when they're hovered is fine, but working out the drag part is probably going to be harder.
• I don't want to spend ages on something that'll be imperfect at best, so I think I'll have to pull in jQuery after all.
• Vaguely considering a more "normal" looking site that can be browsed in a more stable and boring way. My own editing tools will definitely need their own space.

...It'll definitely be a while before I'll have anything to show for all of this, but at least I'm enjoying myself! Having a fake chromeless window sparks some very old joy and makes me excited to put stuff in it, so I think it was worth it.

Hello world! I got basic project and log creation done today, which means I can actually start logging my progress with the tools I've built. I will use the project page itself to explain how this works but tl;dr I'm overengineering my site.

Honestly, the thing that intimidates me the most is adding in the tools for me to sort things and make them look pretty...it's a lot easier to just smash them in without caring about what it feels like to use them, and even easier if I just made these as static pages rather than do an entire backend. But since I suffer from 1. major inertia 2. lack of chill, I need to work on making these friendly to work with.

For now, the following are done:

• Setup for workflow
• Project categories creation/editing
• Project/project log creation
• A basic layout that I think I might rip out and make funkier (aka antagonise mobile users)