- changing font from Roboto Mono to IBM Model3x Alt4 from https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/
- made it so windows cannot leave the upper, left or right window boundaries
- bunch of minor css changes
- wow it's been a while
- added intraloops article hooray
- added intraloops to musics page
- website kinda broken rn whoops
- hard at work (actually hardly but still) on the website refactor. doing lots of clean up on the back end which has become a horrifying mess. probably several changes coming to the front end side as well, especially on the animations and transitions front. next up probably musics page overhaul.
- more music added to xhbplayer
- all music in xhbplayer is now normalised
- new festive website added to web stuff
- more metadata for pages
- home page separator removed, extra margin to compensate
- new windows now spawn at the top (highest z-index)
- windows now spawn initially at z-index 100 so it doesn't interfere with the site's elements
- fixed windows going under post image and title
- made bulletins prettier
- added box-shadow to iframes, removed border
- less contrast on star background
- each post now includes an image under index.png
- post web page includes the given image in the background of main heading
- image and other relevant information is now available in the open-graph style metadata
- musics player icon changed
- added custom scroll bar to musics player
- added latest post title + summary to the home page
- added "featured in" album section in musics
- changed top links on musics to be a grid layout, rather than a simple column
- updated link icons on musics page
- added botb game jam 4 entry to web stuff
- made bulletins be generated using nunjucks template and gulp
- added bulletins rss/atom/json feeds
whoops, haven't been updating these. from 14/04/21 to 01/05/21:
- fixed bug where moving to post page doesn't make the page scroll up fully
- web stuff background now loads properly when routing from another page
- most pages are now mobile compatible, smallest compatible screen now is ~320px
- everything that would open in a window on a desktop now opens on a new page on mobile (imagine if mobile users had to use a floating window manager lol)
- add GPLv3 licence to all the javascripts
- added an overlay for iframes which link to external web pages, warning users that such sites may use cookies and other tracking things
- tags are now sorted alphabetically on postings page
- links page is now centred instead of being left aligned
- guestbook is now resized properly for mobile
- post summaries now exclude mediaURL elements
that's about it... i think
- postings are now sorted by last modification date
- each post now shows its last modification date at the top of the page
- added rss/atom/json feeds for all postings content
- added links to rss/atom/json feeds on the postings page
- router now works between postings and posts (no moar refresh)
- added new transition animation between postings and posts
- using gulp image to optimise most images on the site (new images are taken in via a new folder)
- musicsite is now generated using the nunjucks templates and gulp instead of being a separately generated thing (i actually didn't do this today, but forgot to document it here previously)
- converted some of the client side js for xhbplayer (formerly known as musicsite) to work after the change
- web stuff is now generated using templates with data read from JSON
- web stuff now uses css grid instead of flexbox and changes grid columns depending on screen size
- web stuff elements now 200x200px instead of 150x150px
- navigation bar changed from table to css flexbox
- web stuff images now cropped down to 200x200px and are actually the correct ratio now (which also reduces transfer size; 550 kilobytes total!!!)
- replaced unicode square symbols with asterisks to show post heading level (unicode stuff renders weird across devices)
- replaced read more square symbol with ascii arrow
- added tags for each post, which now display on the postings page
- added a list of all tags on the postings page to allow you to filter based on tag in future
- all tags have their own semi-unique colour (based on first three characters of the tag name)
- added css animation to the read more link under each post (it's really cool)
- redone postings page, which now displays each post title and a short summary of the post content
next time round I think I might work on tags for each post, for easier viewing / filtering purposes. other than that, I'm pretty happy with the postings section and I think I can move onto other stuff soon!
also seems like I need to add line breaks to the post content, that will also be fixed
- updated post template
- post template now includes sticky table of contents element at the side of text content to show the overall post structure
- fixed router bug where router would initialise when changing hash state
- standardised containers for images and embedded videos in article files
posts almost done now, gonna work on the postings page next time round!
- added post rendering using nunjucks with gulp to initiate renders
- fixed mouse follow not working properly after window resize for the interactive star field
- made musics background brighter
- about page now centred instead of left-aligned
at this point i'm maybe planning to release everything post-exams, so probably june? here's hoping!
- fixed some minor js errors
- created base template for most pages to follow
- moved home and about pages to new template
later in the same day..
- moved all main pages to new template
- fixed a few errors with the move
- added new modular page titles
- moved everything to a git repo (why wasn't I using a git repo??)
- decided to move to nunjucks templates with gulp as a way of processing files
- changed fonts everywhere (all roboto mono because browsers have no support for bitmap fonts which is sad) including on the musics player
hopefully with the new templates and gulp file processing I will be able to avoid doing stupid crap like copy pasting blocks of script or link tags and be able to update everything from one convenient place. changing stuff in projects should always be as easy as possible!! managing a plain old HTML code base really shows how important it is to have something in the background managing all these assets... if I was to continue without making any back-end changes I think it would get very difficult to manage everything, like adding a new js script for example.
I'm pretty happy with this move, gonna be working on the back end of this site for a little while this week.
- added animated background to links page
- made sure that the router stops all background animations on a page, which previously caused slowdown
- removed 'zone' from navigation menu
- added musics player random functionality
- musics player now remembers previously played entries in localStorage
- changed musics animated background colour
- fixed problem where musics background would increase in velocity
- moved animations from 1280x720 to 640x480 for better performance
- battle of the bits image now fetches my aura as background
- duck????????
welcome to 2021!! project still in not-released progress.
haven't updated the bulletins very thoroughly lately, but I've been working on a guestbook for the site from the ground up in PHP and that has taken me a few days to get to work/test. still need it to run on production which is annoying because I need to access the sql database remotely.
it was fun to make though and I really wanted to have some part of the site that people could contribute to, even if it's as small as a little guestbook comment you can leave on your interneting travels.
v1.0 releasing... maybe before next month?? let's see how much time I'll have during the next semester, though I doubt I'll have much.
- changed all fonts from Roboto Mono to GohuNew
- floating windows now have increased initial size
- added resizeable windows now! it was surprisingly easy and a pure CSS implementation!
- rewrote the about section to be more up to date and generally better
- router now works using forward/back buttons/keys
- window titles now change depending on website title
- new links added to links page
- new help file added to musics player
- web stuff grid updated to 4 elements per row
- new web stuff content!
- musics player now automatically changes to the next song when the current music has finished playing
- updated musics library for newerer one-hour trax! (currently at 14hrs of music on the musics player)
(also yes, it's been this long... such busyness!!)
updates will now detail exact date and whatdoings with site development; shorter but more quantity-consistently existent!
yeah, no release yet and I said it was for sunday sometime...
I mean I was working on a lot of musics, especially for botb and got distracted with things along the way, but I think now it's the time to really get this done, polished and over with, it's really taking it's time
builded a new computer now so that's a nice thing, kinda irrelevant to this but makes things go a bit smoother with better performance and things.
oh and about updates, I've changed the 'projects' tab into 'postings' as I feel it would be better to set up some word-based blog posts as separate little html pages instead of a full page just dedicated to projects, let's be honest it would be a bit neglected
so in short, things are moving along slowly but still somewhat moving
why is this website not released yet lol
let's get back to work then, I'm gonna set a deadline for next sunday to have all of this ready to go, I should have enough time now because 2020 lockdown, pretty much the only thing to do is do the postings page and finish the about and musics pages, though pretty much everything is ready to go
maybe I should also include a guestbook, I think that's a nice idea until I get some kind of comments type system up and running, which would take a while to write myself
more things in web stuff added yay, I added all html and svg stuff from my battle of the bits entries which is pretty nice
still need to fix a bug in the zone canvas routine where it keeps running after the web page route is changed (oops) and that takes a big hit on performance, this project is actually taking forever but too busy with other things :(
after a long while, scripts (and background canvas animations) are loading correctly now! however, this is a bit of a hack as I have to load all js files that will be used across all websites that use the router and then have each website contain a small inline javascript snippet with class 'routerInit', which the router executes and can be used to reference other scripts (and yeah I am initialising a new class per router transition and I'm not setting this to a variable so I hope the garbage collector is doing a good job lol).
I did have another approach which loaded the javascript dynamically, but I found that animations played a bit slower than usual, I suspect this is due to the JIT (just-in-time) compiler which runs when scripts are being loaded as per normal. I might be wrong, but I think that the JIT wasn't being run when running appendChild on a newly created script DOM element, which resulted in slower performance.
though I think this approach, while not ideal, is better imo as it ensures the JIT compile is being used and less requests have to be made every router transition. it is a silly hack but for a small website like this, that's alright, if I was making something more substantial I would probably use a framework and not hack everything together with vanilla js :p
bulletin/updates are up and ready to go! this site is in pretty slow development but I'm getting there, it's a bigger project than I expected! using an org mode file for this so gonna have to update this statically, though that's not too bad anyways