new site! new site!

before:

after!

come visit!

so, this feels amazing. it feels more me. i feel way more confident than i did with html/css two years ago. i've learnt a lot about actually what my style looks like.

be sure to shift+f5 if it doesn't update! i don't know if this is just a problem i have personally but sometimes my cache doesn't refresh when there are new updates to my site.

some general thoughts:

• a LOT of the content from even 2021 felt stale and needed updating (the f/o page desperately needs me to add new blorbos.). i haven't gotten around to updating all the text yet, so for now we'll just have to keep it as is. this is a style update first and foremost.
• this is also technically the 'nsfw update', because i only started drawing porn in late 2021 and had originally intended to make a new site for it. i had considered putting nsfw stuff on a separate page but ultimately realised... i love drawing sex so much that it bleeds through to my non-sexy stuff too. so i guess it just has to stay in one place.
• i made some extremely subtle font changes that i think gel well with the old-style vectors everywhere. this was tough! i was torn about whether i wanted to use 'display' fonts, but i decided that i would prefer decoration over fanciful fonts, and also all my buttons are with plain serif font so i wanted to keep that.

some lessons learnt:

• js is still my favoured way of loading my navigation bars unfortunately, which isn't ideal but is better than the alternatives. the js could eventually be mitigated with a ssg, even coding one of my own that is super basic and just slaps the header and footer on a page as well as the stylesheets and auto-updates the pages in a local folder. another thing i could build for people who can't enable JS is a sitemap, but i don't have enough pages for that.
• gallery pages are hard! everything is just lazy loaded. you'll have to just open the images in a new tab if you want to see art up close. my plan is to eventually have a dedicated comic page with a framework frankensteined in to handle changing pages. for now you will just have to zoom.
• having a css framework, even a super basic one, does NOT mean you reduce the amount of inline css or ridiculous number of classes in your stylesheet. it does probably mean you can use those lines on more interesting stuff. i got really into svg dividers if you couldn't tell. my favourite descriptive/nondescriptive class from this round of updates is .use-if-wrap-fucked, which is because i had to manually flexbox wrap a bunch of things that weren't playing nice with the responsive columns. held together with string!

what next >:)

• accessibility updates. semantic tags and alt text for all of the images.
• tidying the css that is now a mess of unused classes.
• a key update for next time will be shrine pages <3
• i'd like a zine/comix page for when i get off my ass and make some zines.
• i cut the updates page because i wasn't using it, but i do want to consider an alternative that might be easier for me to update. this is probably something where i need a framework or generator to handle it for me because i hate the process of incrementally uploading things, rather than doing giant content drops like just now.