Latest updates for the end of January through February!
- Updated the Free Speech Webring to be a self-hosted webring. Essentially did the exact same thing that was done to The Book Ring which was explained in Update #38. New members no longer have to struggle with getting the navigation arrow links correct. Just copy/paste the code for the widget, fill out the form to apply for the ring and that’s it! Once you’ve been accepted into the ring, the widget will automatically update on your site to work.
- As requested, I’ve added a toggle button sitewide to enable/disable the scanlines to help with accessibility. 🙂 This was a feature that was requested a couple of times over the past year and I figured it was time it got added in. I like the scan lines effect, but I understand it makes it hard for some folks to read so this is a good solution for everybody.
- Fixed the drawing canvas in the Museum. The drawing line was terribly off center from the cursor. This is now fixed!
- I’ve massively updated my youworldoftext.com world. I’ve deleted everything, which feels bittersweet since I’ve been saving people notes on it for about a year now. But I’ve always kind of had an itch to make it more organized, and after seeing how Salevn designed their world, I took some creative inspiration and gave mine a solid revamp. Now it has pretty organized sections instead of everything being clumped together. If anyone would like to write a little something on my new note wall to help get it started, you can find it in on my Cottage subdomain in the ‘Leave a Note’ tab of the main page.
- Worked a bit more on Marigold Town’s library. I feel so sad that it’s taking me so long to finish it and get something solid up, but truthfully, the web building isn’t anywhere near like WordPress. The reason why I’m able to get so much done on this website is because WordPress provides a lot of convenient mediums to build with. I have a drag/drop web builder, elements I can add code to, I can copy/paste various elements and features instead of having to do everything from scratch, and that’s why I love working with WordPress so much. It really suits the style of web building I’m comfortable with and thrive using. Web building purely from scratch is not a medium I’m very comfortable with, nor my preferred medium, but I do still want to work on building a solid space in Marigold Town that can compliment the Book Ring, but also really stand on its own as a Small Web bookish resource hub.
Anyhow, today I got a lot of Cyrus’s javascript dialogues done (which I may still tweak or change), and also got about half of the front page done. I have absolutely no clue what I’m going to fill all the shelves with yet, so I’m going to have to take some time to brainstorm that a bit. - Finished creating my webring realm portal!! I’ve had this idea in my head for quite awhile now and I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to execute it, but it turned out better than I could have imagined. I started by taking a bunch of screenshots of the water animation in Tiny Glade, stitched them all together into an animated gif with Canva, then I made some boat gifs in Canva. This was actually the easy part. The hard/tedius part was putting it all together and making it so that all of the webrings had the boat animation and moved at various speeds across the water. I was up til around 3:30am last night at the time of this writing just trying to get it all working, and then a little bit today too. But I finally finished it and I couldn’t be more proud of how it turned out. ♥ And I’m sure many of you will be happy to know that no AI imagery was used in the making of this. I’m not an illustrator but this was my own creative process at work using legitimate means. 🙂
In addition to this, I’ve also updated my image map and made it so that when someone clicks the ‘Realm Portal’ part of the map, the page automatically scrolls down to the area. Originally I had planned on making a totally separate page just for the webrings, but realized it would really be a hassle to reach out to all the webring webmasters to have my URL updated, plus, when people come here via the webrings, I want them to start out on my landing page and go from there. So I think the way it ended up was for the best, even if it wasn’t fully what I had planned. - Added buttons for my Small Web promotional Facebook page & group to the side bars. I used to have the buttons on the front landing page but with the addition of the Realm Portal area, I’ve deleted everything that used to be there prior. I still want people to find the groups though because I think it’s important to have some mainstream platforms in order to help the Small Web grow. Speaking of which, the page and group have grown a lot over the past couple of months! The group has been becoming more active, I’m noticing several people starting to participate and/or becoming regular participants which is exciting. The page has also grown substantially. A lot of people who’ve never heard of the Small Web are starting to follow the page, so they get to see featured websites daily. I’ve joined a lot of relevant groups that I’m going to start sharing daily features to as well, and I think with consistency the group and page will really take off and become a fantastic launching point for people discovering this movement for the first time.
- Added a ‘Mark As Read’ button to the bottom of each post. I don’t really care if people like or dislike these update posts, but I am curious to know how many folks actually read them. I doubt these updates are all that interesting but who knows. Maybe some people follow along and like to see what’s new around here. This button is a good privacy-respecting way for me to roughly gauge how many people actually bother to read my little web dev updates. If you read this post, test it out! 🙂
I’ve also done something similar for my Newspaper section on my Cottage subdomain. Guests can add a heart to indicate that they’ve read it. I would have liked to stick to the ‘mark as read’ format for that too and use the same icon, but the plugin that implements that functionality for those kinds of posts is different. I’m fine with it though, it still fulfills the same purpose helping me get a rough gauge of how many people read through my posts. - I’ve started adding to the FAQ section of my ‘yourworldoftext’ iframe on my cottage subdomain (see the ‘leave a note’ tab on the front page). The question about the use of AI images on my site is something that keeps popping up every once in awhile, so that seemed appropriate to answer there. Basically any questions that kind of keep reoccurring will be posted there going forward. I have a space next to the answered questions there where folks can ask more questions and I’ll answer them. If you want yours answered, keep it respectful. I can tell what’s passive aggressive.
- Fixed up the blog category template’s CSS on my Town subdomain. It was previously a plain black page, nothing was readable. I’m surprised I hadn’t noticed it sooner. It’s fixed now. 🙂
- Made a minor change to the Free Speech Webring’s rules and combined rule 3 & 4 together.
- Switched over a few more AI filler photos to my Tiny Glade dioramas, my Canva creations, and my photography. A continuous work in progress but it’s getting there. Pages that have been affected so far are my main page and Newspaper page on my Cottage subdomain (added pixelated photos of myself to stay consistent with the pixelart theme), the background of my Small Web subdomain (Tiny Glade background), my Guestbook and Mail A Letter page on this subdomain (Canva creations). I love how it all turned out so far and the new color schemes on the Guestbook and Mail A Letter pages are giving me an itch to start my Spring theme. I’m kind of obsessed with pinks and coral colors right now. So maybe I’ll tinker with that over the next few days.
- I’ve recently started up a Tumblr community! You can expect to find the same content over there as my Facebook page and group, but if Tumblr is more your speed than Facebook, it’ll just be another spot to hang out, share cool sites and small web resources.
Tumblr has been around a very long time, and I think would draw in a lot more people who remember the spirit of the old web. A lot of people on there are more tech savvy as well given the blog customization involves a bit of code knowledge for theme layouts. I think the demographic on Tumblr would be really enthusiastic about discovering the Small Web for the first time.
I’m going to *try* to be as consistent posting there as I have been on Facebook. At the moment, Tumblr Communities is a fairly new feature and doesn’t have a very advanced content management system like Facebook does, which has helped me keep the FB page and group active daily. Regardless, I’m going to try and keep the posts around the same frequency as there.
These social media pages have been a lot to keep up with, but I do see them growing and have noticed a few people who have never built a personal website before showing interest, so I know these posts are reaching people on mainstream platforms who may not have discovered the Small Web otherwise. I don’t know if I’ll run these pages forever, but for now I feel like it is doing a lot of good for the movement, it’s growing, and it’s a way I feel like I can really contribute to this movement, is by helping people discover it and show them a way out of the corporate driven web. - Lastly, my hosting provider sent me an email this month stating my site has hit 5,000 unique visitors! That probably doesn’t seem like a lot to a lot of people but it is to me and means a lot. It’ll be two years since I started this site next month, and I feel so proud with how far it’s come, and how far I’ve come over those past two years. I never would have imagined this space to grow the way it has. When I first started building it, I would change the layout and such every month or two. I just could never really seem to settle with a long term structure. And while mine currently changes backgrounds and colors with the seasons, the overall structure since I’ve started ‘realm weaving’ has generally stayed consistent, which I really like. I feel happy with the current structure of things. Beyond the layout though, I really credit the ‘realm weaving’, roleplay aspect of my site to Marigold Town. While my site obviously isn’t a copy of Marigold.town, the spark of inspiration to create a space that feels more like an actual ‘place’ verses just a digital scrap book of sorts is credited to them. I just love the idea of building a world with interactive characters and creating a sort of living fantasy world.
Anyways, that’s it for this month’s updates! Thanks for reading and keeping up with the changes around here. 🙂
