A few tweaks and things!
- Created a Neighborhood ‘clique’. Folks can join through the Resident Services page. May end up tweaking it later depending on if it does well or not. Right now I have one of the conditions to join as having a certain navigation structure but may end up just ditching that. I like the idea of this clique having sites with navigation systems themed like physical spaces as a theme, but at the end of the day probably only a small select few will want to do that so I might end up ditching that condition to open it up to more people. Will wait a bit and see how it goes, if anyone bites. 🙂
- Modified Candace’s dialogue in Resident Services a bit in alignment with the new Neighborhood clique. She’s been telling people for months that they could eventually ‘move’ into the town, and now theoretically with the clique, they can. So that’s one thing on my backlog that’s finally finished.
- Started working on a shop section of my website. I want to sell pre-made layouts for static HTML web builders like Neocities for folks who might not have the technical knowledge on coding a layout for their space, but want to participate in the small web nonetheless. They’ll be cheap and affordable for everyone, and even better, these layouts will come already mobile responsive, and I’ll have notes within the code to help people identify each section so modifying the code will be easier for beginners. I may add graphics packs to my shop too like stamps/buttons, icons, etc. Now that my site is developed to the point where everything I offer is personal and free, it’d be nice to have a small section that allows me to make a buck or two. I don’t actually host this site on Neocities – my Neocities just has an iframe of my site so I can more easily participate in the community there. I pay for my web hosting, so it’d be nice for my site to eventually be able to pay for itself when the bill comes.
- Added and removed feeds from my Mental Health Garden on the Sacred Space page of my Cottage subdomain. Some feeds were old and not posting much anymore, and I recently found a new content creator on Youtube I really align with for motivation. She gives really great, realistic advice for self improvement and growth. 🙂
- Moved my interactive text wall from my cottage subdomain to my primary domain’s landing page. I figure more people end up there than in my cottage and will be more likely to leave a message before moving on to the next site.
- Created a new avatar/logo image I can use to represent myself on other platforms as well as across all of my subdomains. Wanted something that had Studio Ghibli vibes and I feel like it works! I really like the look of it a lot, it’s a lot cleaner looking than my old logo of the black cat with the sunflower crown, and technically, the old logo wasn’t something of my creation, but just a bunch of Canva graphics thrown together. This one is one I feel proud of and is of my own creation just using various shapes. Speaking of my own creations, I’d still really like to go through my site and replace all the AI generated background images with my own, but it’ll take quite awhile yet as I still have quite a backlog of projects I need to get finished, both on this site and on other things entirely. But it is something I’m thinking about. I’d really like to ditch the AI pics entirely at some point, but for now they are useful for creating the vibe I’m going for on my site.
- I probably mentioned this in a previous update, but I’ve been working on completely revamping The Book Ring (Marigold Town’s Library) and it’s FINALLY completed after about 30 hours of development I somehow managed to cram within a couple of days lol. It isn’t perfect and I still plan to expand on it and tweak it where necessary, but the foundation is laid out and I feel pretty happy with the finished result. In addition to the general revamp, I’ve also implemented a sort of bookish social network. Although this feature isn’t strictly for webring members, I think it will greatly compliment the webring as it provides a way to members to more easily interact, follow each other, and create book clubs with the ‘Groups’ feature. There’s also customizable user profiles and even private messaging functionality! The community is also RSS compatible and publicly viewable, so even if you’re not part of the community, you can still keep up with all the happenings and activity there.
Overall, I’m really so excited about this development and to have finally finished this major thing on my site’s to-do list. While I’ve ultimately decided against doing a ‘Small Web’ cafe of sorts (for now), this bookish community is a lot more centered around my personal interests and something I feel a lot more confident in moderating and maintaining. So I hope you guys enjoy it! If you’d like to check it out, you can view it either at https://library.marigold.town/ or https://library.thecozy.cat/.
Anyways, that’s it for September updates! Thanks for reading and I’ll see ya’ll sometime next month. 🙂
