Here are the latest updates for March-April 2025!
- Updated Candace’s NPC image on my Small Web subdomain. Yes, she is AI image generated, as will all of my site NPCs will be. However, I am gradually making shifts and any AI artwork I generate will be substantially modified by myself before I release the finished result. I know a lot of folks have extreme grievances against AI generated artwork, however, I do feel this is a way to use AI generated artwork in an ethical way, and ultimately, that is what I’m striving towards. I’m not an illustrator, I can’t draw very well, but I do have a good amount of experience photo editing. If anyone is interested in seeing the before and after of Candace, I have posted about it here on my Cottage subdomain. I’ve changed a lot about her from the original image, including her pose, her eye color, her hair, and facial expressions which were done by photo manipulation and a bit of my own painting. I feel really proud with how it turned out! I’ve also animated her images in the javascript so that when she is talking, you can visually see her talking as the text is generating, and when she stops talking, her mouth stops moving and she smiles and blinks. ♥ With each update I feel like my characters are coming to life more and more. It’s a very slow progression but it excites me seeing things move forward.
In addition to updating Candace’s NPC image, I’ve also do the same process and animations with Cyrus, my NPC character for my library subdomain. If anyone is interested in seeing the editing process for him, I’ve also changed him quite a bit from the original. You can see that update here. I’ve also removed the AI chat bot from Cyrus for now. Like I mentioned in last month’s update, the chatbot I was using has a lot of bugs that I can’t fix with the limited tools I have. I used that specific model because it was the most privacy respecting one I could find that, as far as I’m aware, didn’t collect input data or anything. I care a lot about privacy so going with a more advanced one like Google is a no go. I hate Google, they collect anything and everything and I want as little to do with Google as possible. So for now I’ve decided to change course and go a different route, sticking with my previous visual-novel-like system to bring my website’s characters to like. I am getting chatGPT to reword a lot of the information I’m feeding Cyrus so that he emulates a very specific type of character. I’m going for a sexy flirty librarian type. I figured it would be a hit with the book girlies. 😆 I might make him “romanceable” – we’ll see. I really love this aspect of my website, bringing my ‘realm’ to life to feel like a real place. So fun! - Been working incredibly hard on my smallweb subdomain! I’ve been in the process of changing up my social media schedule for my Facebook and Tumblr pages/groups to be more engaging instead of being strictly a promo group. Being just a promo group was fine but I really think I could do so much more with them and they could have so much more potential to grow if I mixed the content up a bit. I’ve learned a lot of social media marketing from my various business ventures over the years, and I really want to try and utilize that to help promote the small web as much as possible. I know it’s not something a lot of other people will want to take on, most people join the small web to get away from social media, so I get it. As awful as it is though, there’s no denying the power it has to grow businesses, events, and even movements, and I feel like there’s a lot of potential there for the Small Web to really be discovered and get established as a real, known alternative to the corporate web. But the thing is, people who are part of the corporate web will have no idea it even exists if there are little to no avenues on the corporate web to even discover it. So this is something I really want to be able to contribute to the movement that I think could really help it gain more momentum. It takes a bit of time to get all the posts and everything made and scheduled, but once they’re done it’ll pretty much just run on autopilot. I’m hoping to have about 9 months worth of posts completed within *hopefully* the next couple of weeks. I do tend to get distracted easily though so, we’ll see. I’ve also made a little section on the front page of my smallweb subdomain that shows all the social media posts. People can interact with the posts directly from my site or through my various social media channels. That subdomain essentially will act as its own content silo. Posts originate from my domain and get distributed to various social networks automatically. This saves me from having to post to a bunch of different platforms, and also should anything ever happen to those platforms, all my content is safe here on my own domain.
- Added a bunch more resource links to the Resources page of my smallweb subdomain. I want to focus more on this now that a lot more traffic is coming in to that subdomain. I’ve always had a decent sized collection of links there but really want to expand on that library and make it even better. Eventually I’ll probably restructure the page a bit to make it more organized, but for now it works good enough.
- Added more links to my social media accounts promoting my small web campaign. Also want to credit Mero for extending the campaign over to Twitter/X. She’s been so supportive of this effort. I’m not a regular user of Twitter/X, so her taking on that platform is a great help. If anyone else feels inspired to extend this campaign by creating accounts or groups across social media dedicated to promoting the Small Web / Indie Web, please let me know and I absolutely will promote you! The more people who are promoting this movement on the big corporate platforms, the more it will grow and break through into the mainstream. This is the goal of this campaign. As much as a lot of folks in this movement hate social media, unfortunately that is where we need to be promoting this movement most, because that is where the majority is. People can’t leave big tech platforms if they don’t even have a clue alternatives like the Small Web or Fediverse even exist. So that’s where we need to be if we want this movement to become more than just a small niche. Soon I will try and get some promotion materials up on that domain as well for people to use if anyone else would like to start their own promotion campaigns.
- Made custom 80x15px buttons for OnTopList.com and Blogarama on my landing page. I hated that the buttons weren’t all consistent so I fixed it.
- Started working on a promotion page for my smallweb subdomain. Essentially what this is is a resource page that I’m going to fill up with tons of shareable images that people can use if they want to promote the Small Web on their own social media. Not everyone has a knack for graphic design or marketing so I just want to make something that’s easy for people to save and share so more people can help this movement grow.
- Removed the ‘home’ link from the navigation menu of the Library. I feel like it made things confusing when just trying to navigate back to the activity feed. The Library’s landing page can still be accessed by clicking the logo.
I’d really like to do more with the Library and community, but right now it’s kind of taking a back seat until I get the Small Web marketing campaign finished for the year. Currently I have Thursdays and Sundays fully scheduled for an entire year’s worth of posts. I have Meme Mondays scheduled up until the first week of August, and the rest of the days still need to be finished and scheduled for the year. It’s definitely taking longer than anticipated as I’m pacing myself so I don’t get burnt out. I’ve been debating on whether to really bother with Facebook or not because it’s really not taking off so much anymore like I hoped it would. Tumblr, on the other hand, is, and I suspected it would. I can only schedule a month’s worth of posts in advance in Meta’s Business Suite that will automatically post to my FB group. In a week or two, I will run out of posts via their scheduler and switch to an automated sharing system on my WordPress so posts will be distributed from my small web subdomain. They will automatically share to my FB page, but not my FB group so, I’m not entirely sure what will become of it then. I might take a couple mins a day to just share from my page to keep the group active, just hoping I’ll remember. If I don’t though, I’m not too pressed. At least there is one channel on that platform that can act as a transition point for people to discover the Small Web movement, explore it, and realize it as a solid alternative to the corporate web, and that’s really all that matters.
Anyways, that’s it for March updates! A bit rambly but this is my thought process.My site is always pretty active, I’m always tinkering around with some kind of project around here. Thanks for reading and keeping up with my rambly web dev ramblings.