I've been so preoccupied with things in my life I haven't sat down and really focused much. It's a good preoccupation though! So have a jumble of subjects and links.

First, Apple has been putting the pressure on Tumblr again to 'get rid of the porn' on the app, and it's lead to some of the most frustrating posts and wild accusations of people that clearly don't understand how the whole process works. Luckily, one former dev of Tumblr spoke up about the changes and why things are the way they are and I just love when devs talk about behind the scene stuff.

https://sreegs.tumblr.com/post/671649355334336512/alright-lets-talk-about-apple-and-tumblrs

What I find even more fascinating is one of the dev's older topics about the history of Tumblr's Ads and this really sheds light on just how badly Tumblr was gutted by Yahoo/Verizon.
https://sreegs.tumblr.com/post/670206966670458880/whats-up-with-tumblr-ads

The devs that works on Tumblr genuinely loved their service and they wanted so bad to provide something good but being acquired by Yahoo ate them from the inside. It makes me so angry when I see comments about how 'the staff doesn't care', because they do, they always do. The people that 'don't care' are usually one or two people at the top that aren't even in development, like accounts, shareholders, or the board that only want to know if something will give them money in the end. The people that make the staff posts, that try to manage the sea of tickets that can be anything from valid to reactionary, the people that are on the bottom of the chain, don't deserve the ire that people direct toward them when someone on the board made a decision to add/get rid of/change a feature.

It was honestly very sad to see the volume of people making comments like 'I always forget there are real people behind the site'. Like... How do you forget that!! (I know how, it just makes me sad.)

It makes me think about how most humans really do love to know how things are made and while we have so many videos about how things are physically constructed, there's very little out there that talk about things like, software development. Too many people have this assumption that things are made by popping in a few plugins, or having code auto-fills, and that's just the people that have the barest knowledge of coding but no real experience.

https://medium.com/@krave/apple-s-app-store-review-process-is-hurting-users-but-we-re-not-allowed-to-talk-about-it-55d791451b
Things like this post on Apple's review process from 2015 show that 'just do ____' isn't as helpful a comment as you think it is, since the process of getting an app approved by apple is not a pleasant one.

I really do wish more devs would speak up about the really stupid and inane issues they've had to deal with in changing or adding even the 'simplest' sounding things. Software runs so much of our lives and most people have no clue what all goes into it, giving people the wrong impression of what it is and we really need more accessible information about all of this u_u

Slightly adjacent in the scripting field, going to the subject of making websites.

If you look for 'how to make a website' sources you either run into videos or things like this
https://www.studentartguide.com/articles/how-to-make-an-artist-website
that amount to 'just install wordpress' and not really.. the basic ins and outs of scripting your site.

There's this little search project someone is working on that is a search engine that tries to find text heavy websites to find things that might be ignored by your other search engines these days.
https://search.marginalia.nu/
It is still in the works but I love projects like this so much!!

I searched 'how to make a website' and while there was a lot of unrelated hits as a new experimental service like this is meant to be, but I came across these two charming sites.
https://www.thesitewizard.com/gettingstarted/startwebsite.shtml
http://www.shira.net/web02-start.htm
Still not exactly what I'm looking for but getting closer. They're just nice little spots frozen in time and I appreciate it.

Sometimes I wonder about making a 'how to make a website' documentation but I have no idea if I have the bandwidth for that. But I can at least make a few more fun Moyra's Web Jewels conversion templates for people to learn from because the best way to learn is to get some simple, easy to follow scripts and pull it apart yourself.

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/778933.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Me, idly one morning: 'I really need to figure out how to make an XML Site Map'
30 min later: Cool I have a sitemap now :O

After way too long I finally got around to throwing down something on the projects page that had been an empty link for ages.
http://armaina.com/projects.html
So now I have something in writing for real on my website that shows any stranger wandering onto my site that I'm doing more than just pretty drawings and there's a purpose and pointing people into directions based on my synopsis.

Also going to figure out how to make pages display specific custom details when in their link preview on things like Discord or Twitter. And I still need to make my favicons. I may not like the current state of web 3.0 social media nonsense, but I have to adapt to it, either way. Also going to try to brush up a bit on my CSS beautifying, I want to make it look just a little bit more 'sleek', something a bit less amateurish, if I can. I have my function down, it's easy to navigate, it works, and now that all my pages are in, it's time to see if I can get it a little fancy and learn something new.

I've been doing kinda NaNoWriMo this month. It's more so that I've made a promise to myself to open up my growing list of WIPs and text files and work on them to some degree. The point is less to write one thing or hit 50K, but just to make myself set aside the time to write more in general. It's a habit I need to do more often in general, just like I would with art, so that I can get my scripts rolling at a steady pace. Glad to say it's been going well and I'm at least writing something. And the sooner I have a lot of somethings, the sooner I have a finished product.

Apart from that, been busy with all the above and work. Work is still going great, and all my co-workers are just fantastic!

And now, have a stack of links to things I found interesting or cool.

This post about The Brave Little Toaster and a theme of Faith, but not strictly faith in the religious sense.
https://walonvaus.dreamwidth.org/139434.html

A video of a test-concept of full-on artificial muscle structures on a robotic arm. While non-viable for real prosthetic work in this day and age, it's really cool to see functioning mechanisms like this for personal reference in super future robotics concept/design.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guDIwspRGJ8

Been hearing about Crypto and NFTs and have no idea what's up? Want a remarkably thorough breakdown about that everything means? Here you go.
https://antsstyle.medium.com/why-nfts-are-bad-the-long-version-2c16dae145e2

We still have no idea how Eels reproduce and that's wild
https://nautil.us/issue/88/love--sex/eels-dont-have-sex-until-the-last-year-of-their-life

Speaking of Oddities, I've really enjoyed the chill vibes of this old tech Videographer for a long time now, and I think more should too. He's got this fun Oddware series where he reviews Odd and Unique old hardware. I recommend pretty much everything he does but his Oddware is a nice place to start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBtETkJeqmY&list=PLB9FA1979AB986522

This entry was originally posted at https://armaina.dreamwidth.org/778054.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

There was a very popular thing to do back in the mid 90's that was only possible because of the fact that almost all monitors were 800x600 for a long time. It was a trick where you used a background that would be the perfect size to make it look like your web-page had borders on each side.

This specific technique is, of course, not possible to do anymore now with how monitors are getting up into the 4K side of things, and for a while I've wanted to re-create this look, using more modern scripts and techniques. So naturally I had to find a page using one of Moyra's old backgrounds and re-tool it.

https://rowen.tripod.com/xena/battlecry.html
Here you can see for yourself exactly what these layouts look like, now.

http://armaina.com/layouts/greekborder/
And after spending a few hours in it today, this is my final result. I cut up the image, made PNGs with transparent shadows for each of the boarders, then made the textured background it's own element to tile. The rest is, of course, just me messing around and spending more time making the elements prettier than I needed them to be.

All in all I'm pretty happy with the result, learned some new things on a personal level in the process. (my code gets a little nicer looking every time I try digging into these things) I would like to find more of Moyra's old stuff like this to splice up and script them into little things like this for people to be able to download and use for themselves if they so want. Will make little layouts of my own, eventually, but this is a fun endeavor, and I'd like her work to live-on... (unless she ever comes back..)

*longingly looks in the direction of Moyra's Web Jewels archive*
"I just want her back"

I thought? I had talked about this moderately recently but I guess not? But I've been working on my website, mostly on the CSS front.

http://armaina.com/

The overall look is still the same but I've been doing little things here and there to try to beautify the website a little, little things like adding little extra style and also adding in some nice and fancy custom fonts to the site. Honestly the custom fonts do SO much to the overall feel of the site despite being such a simple addition and I'm glad I added them.

The other massive breakthrough was discovering the CSS Grid syntax (max-device-width). Which meant I could designate specific things for my website elements to do at the width of the device, as opposed to the PX size which is so different now due to the DPI size of phone and tablet screens now. This means everything re-arranges in more optimal positions for the appropriate size of the device for much easier navigation/viewing.

In relation to that, spottyjaguar helped me figure out a more tricky arrangement with element bound inside one of the grid elements so that they are side-by-side in the wide view but below each other in a narrow view. If you are on the about page or the colleagues page if you shrink or expand the window you can see how the elements shift depending on the width of the screen.

All in all this is the happiest I've ever been with a website layout of my own in a long time. It's not the most fancy but it certainly feels the most competent. Now I just have to make myself a title image that looks a little more Cohesive with what I got there lol. Also maybe figure out something better for what I have written on the home page. But it's nice to have a website that I feel more confident in showing to people.

One of the most significant banes of my existence has been the lack of proper webcomic CMS options available. See if you look for anything webcomic self-hosting related, most services direct you to the most available and common, Comic Press. A Wordpress Plugin.
http://comicpress.net/
It's not bad by any means I just have a great disdain for WordPress and I don't need something THAT big or powerful for a webcomic, I can make the rest of the site myself, I JUST need an engine for the webcomic.

There have been CMS options that have come and gone over the years, many of them were barebones and died because they were insecure and their developers couldn't keep up with the security patches. So there's never been any clear winner for a Comic CMS in my eyes. Even now in 2020, there are very few options and I'll list the few I've found.

https://www.webcomicx.com/
This one actually seems pretty nice but it uses ASP.net which means you'd have to have a Windows server in order to run it which, I don't have. Great if you have a windows server tho!

http://www.clickthulu.com/
Was looking through this and it seems nice enough Buuut it's 100$ a year for a license. Which I sincerely, do not have and I don't even know if the features are ones that work for me without using it myself. I'm not opposed to a paid CMS but I need to know more about what I'm paying for.

http://ptyxis.cthonic.com/
This one seems to be the most reasonable contender, I just need to install it and use it for myself and hope there isn't any vulnerabilities.

http://www.comicctrl.com/
The makers for HiveWorks is going to release a to the public version of their webcomic CMS! Cool! except their last update was September 2019 :/ This is one of those services I'd be more amicable to pay for as it's got a tried and true service used by most of the Hive Works comic artists they just need to release it first!!

Why must webcomic hosting try me so.

Time for more Adventures in Running a Server!!

So I've been trying to install Icecast2 onto the server (after the rates for my streaming service in second life went up I had been considering running it on my own) and after much trial and tribulation, I finally got it to work!
http://radio.armaina.com:8000/
(there's no stream RN, it only plays when I connect to it and stream directly, don't have the bandwidth for a constant stream)

So that's the end goal. But how I got to that point is a tale in my continued frustration with lacking documentation for things with a high barrier of entry that constantly assume you already know everything.
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And now I move on to the next big step and possible headache in running a server takes a deep breath
Encryption.

I'm still stumbling through learning how to use and maintain a debian server but I finally resolved an issue I've had for years: armaina.com worked but www.armaina.com did not

I had attempted to solve this before but couldn't figure it out, I found where the config files were kept but I couldn't edit them.. Only today did someone point out the command 'nano' meant the basic editor 'nano' that's in Debian.

So now that I actually know how to edit dang config files I decided to tackle the other issue I had, where I couldn't install digital ocean's new status tools. Got the install servers updated and now that's all been updated and installed and working correctly.

Installed Icecast to the server and installed/updated the codecs on the server. I just need to figure out how to get icecast to work on the subdomain I have set up then I can test if it actually works.

IDK if it's the fact that I've dosed up on Vite D, or the whole mood shift with having a job, but doing the work is making me less panicked than it used to. It's not a whole lot but it's something I guess.

Speaking of learning how to wrap my brain around things and trying to figure out how to make things work for me, I think I found what it is really what makes it so difficult for me to work with any sort of terminal setup. I need to be able to make a mental connection between the text lines on the terminal and what's actually happening in the files of the server itself, visually.

Each command line is fleeting, ephemera, it's gone after you close the window, sometimes after it's scrolled too far. You can't see what you did last, you can't cross-reference easily, and it's easy to get lost. I get the same panic feeling working in a terminal setting as I do when I'm trying to troubleshoot a problem with a person without being able to see anything. I have to be able to open up the same program and look at the same menus while I walk someone one through it, otherwise, there's nothing to ground me. If I have no references I lose my place all the time, I feel constantly frantic and floaty like grasping at something intangible. Also, my brain just doesn't like it when I can't see everything all at once when I'm troubleshooting, even when organizing stuff physically it can only really do it when I have as much in front of me as possible.

Things clicked for me when I was trying to look up virtual host stuff to try to figure out how to set up another domain. In attempting to see if there was anything I could do to make it work using SCP, I had to figure out where the files for such settings were actually housed. Being able to see where this stuff was, immediately lifted off a significant amount of freezing and intimidation I get with command-line terminal actions. I could finally connect a command-line action, to a specific change the files and exactly where it took place. It was no longer this nebulous thing that just Happens For Some Reason, I knew where to look for the files and had a way to see that they existed at all and what they were named. Now if only I could find tutorials that had side by side comparisons between what you typed into the terminal, and what is going on visually in the files. x_x

At the very least I need to figure out if somehow, somewhere, there's actually a listing for all the default locations new app installs go to. If I at least knew where to look I could try figuring it out from there. I'd still like side-by-side terminal vs visual file system comparisons/guides, but I doubt that'll ever happen. Now to figure out how one backs up and re-deploys a server in case my attempts to work with it ever blow up x_x

Once again wishing I had some templates from back in the early internet to provide people as an intro to website making. Sure everyone says CSS isn't that hard but it's difficult to people that are already intimidated by the process. Even if the pages themselves are easy to work on in a text editor it's frustrating to people that may want to customize the look of their site beyond image swapping. It's simply easier and less of a hurdle to give people the tools to make basic HTML sites than it is to point them to W3schools and tell them to have fun.

So I'm trying to compile a sort of reference of classic HTML template pre-2010 at the latest. Things with no JS, no bootstrap, and nothing that is pure CSS.

https://templated.co/44 This place has a few templates from 2006

http://ann-s-thesia.com/eyesites.shtml
This site is practically frozen in time, old templates but most of them are blog-oriented. If I had expendable income I'd contact the site owner to purchase all the templates ever made for the sake of preservation.

http://www.ironspider.ca/freetemplates/index.htm
Some absolutely classic simple website types, the site itself even has a basic 'how to make a webpage' tutorial with simple HTML introduction. I doubt it's been touched in 10 years and frankly finding little pockets like this is an absolute joy.

Itemizing a few free, GUI based HTML editors, though I may actually make a post later that goes way more in-depth about these, along with some paid services. I just need to save these somewhere, for now, to reference for that later.

https://htmlpen.com/
real-time WYSIWYG editor, like code pen except doesn't need any kind of account and has a WYSIWYG. Being able to see the results of the code on the screen is such a valuable asset for learning something new.

http://bluegriffon.org/
A classic, like something in between Netscape/Sea Monkey Composer and pre-adobe Dreamweaver.

https://mobirise.com/
This is the start of the 'Website Builder' format, similar to places like Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace. This one in particular heavily relies on assets on templates and there are not a lot of free options. Uses bootstrap, not the best option if you're using neocities.

https://pingendo.com/
This has a free and low cost paid version. The biggest thing about its Free version is that it's time-gated, the paid version is a monthly fee. It too is a 'website builder' format editor but far more robust than MobiRise with more template options and a lot of ways to change things despite the templates offered. It also uses bootstrap so once again, maybe not the best option when using Neocities.

https://www.openelement.com/
A free WYSIWYG editor that is the most post-adobe Dreamweaver-like. It can be a bit of a flight deck to people not sure what they're looking at, but if you're familiar with post-adobe Dreamweaver it shouldn't be confusing. It also offers templates but they're not a required part of the application, you can make a site without a template but it too uses bootstrap.

https://editor.silex.me/
Another completely online website editor except this one is in the 'website builder' category. In some ways, it's much more clear and concise than the last 2, with distinct borders over every element and bits and pieces you can drag anywhere. It only appears to be possible to save it to a service like GitHub or dropbox, or uploaded via FTP.

https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started
throwing this down to remind me

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