Finally pushing to just get the damn thing online is not necessarily because Tumblr randomly moved their UI around again, but it’s an appropriate enough coincidence. I set about to actually building this thing around march, which you can tell from the creation dates on some of the pages. Now that I’ve decreed it done enough to go public, for the first post I’ll yap a bit about the development process.
The template page was one of the first I made, because I’d intended from the start to share how I made this site to help others out. That’s because right out the gate, a big problem I had in researching how to build my own self-hosted blog is that every page offering suggestions on how to make your own blog is geared either towards an audience of people who are convinced they will die badly if they have to even look at a html tag, or to an audience that the author kind of assumes already knows how to do it anyway. People like me, who grew up right on the tail end of the pre-social media internet and learned some javascript in college but forgot most of it by now but wouldn’t have a hard time learning it again, are a woefully neglected target demographic in the blog posts telling you how to make a blog market.
As a result, although I found pages suggesting to use a static site generator, none of these pages saying to use a static site generator bothered to explain the base premise that a “static site generator” is a program on your computer that combines files for you, and not some kind of online service like wordpress or whatever. That’s kind of important context actually! Especially because in the modern day anyone trying to host their own thing outside established social media will probably want to specifically avoid exchanging one online service for another. I didn’t want a damn wordpress account, I wanted a way to automatically combine html files that I can host wherever, and jekyll (program) does in fact do the latter, it just doesn’t explain that it does that very well in its promotional material. Anyway, moving on.
Setting up the internal structure of all these pages was pretty easy, the divs and the templates and the inserts and all that. That’s the part that tends to scare people the most about making sites in my experience, but it’s genuinely the easiest part imo. The harder part is finetuning all the colors and image assets. I spent like a week adjusting single pixels on that rose border. It’s what you’re gonna look at the whole time you’re here! It’s gotta look good! But as cool as custom image assets are I am the yapper, and because my website #mywebsite is inevitably going to feature lots of text and I’ll be damned if my very own website is a pain to navigate, it’s important that all the text is easy to read and I couldn’t get too crazy with it. I also had to concede to the reality that most people are online on phones these days, so every time I finally had things lining up nice I had to then test how it looks on phones and adjust everything again and then find a way to preserve my custom image assets vision on a screen for ants.
The gallery was the most challenging thing to set up, mostly because of the specific things I wanted from it. It had to acommodate arbitrary image dimensions in its layout, adjust based on screen dimensions, display in reverse chronological order, contain some kind of tag filter system, and require minimal effort on my part to add new images to it. Since jekyll can read a directory of files to automatically fill a page with posts, and it pulls information from the filenames in the process, I figured it should be possible to do something similar to a directory of image files. After some searching around I combined scraps from things other people wrote for other purposes into the current setup, as all programming goes. All I have to do now is put my latest masterpiece in the appropriate folder and change the filename to contain the date and filters, and the rest happens by itself. I’m so smart.
Then after finishing the basic content structure and visuals came by far the hardest part: actually filling the site. I’ve got plenty stuff I could put on here, the hard part is deciding what to actually put where and how. For the gallery I had to decide not just how much of my older art I’d upload but also how I’d categorise it. As a courtesy I wanted a form of nsfw tag to blur certain images and avoid penis blasting the unassuming scroller, and a filter for the horny stuff I’ve drawn so people can find it easily, but I’m also one of those pretentious perverts who gets off on fully clothed people in symbolically erotic situations, so “things that would reasonably require a blur filter according to modern day online common sense” and “the pervert shit Lance draws” don’t actually have much overlap. I ultimately resolved that by labeling the pervert shit as “erotica” rather than “nsfw” and using “I drew this with one hand” as standard for when to apply it, and implementing a separate “blur image” label that would be excluded from the tag list.
What site development really stalled on though was the snakeknights page, because I’d decided that I wanted to draw images for it to break up the blocks of text, and then they kept releasing more units to talk about which meant more images to draw, and I already had so many other images to draw for things that I’d actually be getting paid for, and video games to play and such. Shit dude, they announced Mantra right as I was finally done adding Wulfenite to the page, and then while researching some of Wulfenite’s interactions I realized my simple arknights math cheatsheet page was FACTUALLY INCOMPLETE so I had to quickly rewrite that to be much longer and actually explain the whole process too. As it goes.
There’s a bunch of other stuff I still want to add to the menu and just decided to shelve in the name of Done Enough. I had a ffxiv header planned where I’d show off my characters, something which would surely delay things several more months as I fight through demons to talk about my original characters #mycharacters. But the main reason I decided to stop fucking around and just put the site up already is because I kept coming up with BLOG POSTS to write that I had no site yet to put them on. I’ve been playing Hollow Knight lately, did you know that? You’re about to, once I fight a few more bosses to lend more academic credibility to what I have to say about it.
Well, I worked hard on what’s here, so be sure to tell me everything looks awesome and you love me ok <3 in fact you can do so right here the moment I figure out how to get my own comments form going instead of signing up for yet another external service for that.
