by dotcomboom

I’m going to keep this post a bit short- I have drafts (and a lab report,,,) in the works, and the nature of this post is partly catch up. I’m gonna cover sites, sites again, and site generator generatoring. So here’s a few updates from my neck of the woods.

Minor dcb v5 updates

Last of the dcb v5 QOL updates have been made, all goes well. What was my largest concern, the projects page, is much more current and complete now with MKWii-RPRedux, some other newer code stuffs and the Craig Cam(!!). I was going to overhaul v5 a little more, but I’m much more in the mood to lay it to rest and go back to working on v6. As always, old site versions will be on Archives.

It felt half-hearted to me for a long time, v5, after how comparatively coherent my prior design with v4 was. This was coupled with closing Lince’s Links—with the overlap in content between the two sites being really bizarre, the WebPC’s PSU fan failing, as well as my own kind of falling out of the sprawled out personal site idea; I’d hoped with v5 to somehow compensate with a new interests section, but this never happened—and also the Patio, which still just makes me sad given how I’ve tried to pick up blogging since.

It might just be post-Major World Event blues, who knows. Regardless of how I feel about the mess of my sites post-v4, they’re part of history and putting v5 to rest in a better place than it was content-wise will let me move into my next site iteration better. Which…

v6: the next dcb.somnol, and getting there

v6 has been in a sort of limbo since late June, but it is a thing.. it is happening.

The specifics may change but it’s shaping up as a single-paged site and I think it’ll be cool. I like the design a lot, the sections only need to get fleshed out. Truth is, it’s been a while coming: I first made the FrontPage 2003 sketch July 2022 on the WebPC (feels way, way longer ago).

Sometime in between, the same summer, I was working on a site version based on the iPod UI in AutoSite. It was really neat but I hit road blocks in how I was gonna take it to the end, and this would be scrapped. (However with the photo bucket [see below] having a mobile theme, I’m actually in a better position now to bring that back as a subsite, if I wanted? The iPod is in an iframe… hmm..)

That October, I remade the FrontPage sketch in iWeb, and drew a really neat Lince for it. It’s not on main Archives yet, but like the FrontPage sketch, feel free to look at the small bit I had. It is mildly embarrassing to share the prototype when I did not follow through on the plan I had then, but it is what it is, really. iWeb was fun to work with, but I felt that scaling it any meant a dire markup rewrite.

It lingered for a while before I finally reimplemented it with my own code early this year, around March. Then, it occurred to me I can have sections below the navigation for a single-paged site, which I think is really sleek. I also adopted a new-to-me solarized light color scheme which looks great on my ereader, and suits the site quite nicely. It’s been a really experimental process, and it’s been dragged on a bit as well due to other stuff going on, but I’ll keep feeling it out and carving out the site I wanna make, since I really hope to get back into a swing of things.

I’m sorry for being a bit of a downer in this section! Didn’t expect to go head on with my complex history with starting sites and not finishing them.. Do enjoy the prototypes though. More (hopefully final) site stuff soon.

A whole goshdarn gallery site

One subsite of v6 that is already available: meet the photo bucket, my new gallery! It runs on Coppermine with a custom theme. I started it up in January and is available now to peruse. The collection has built up over the last year, with many of my photos, drawings and goofing around with technology. If you’re new to it or just haven’t popped in in a while, poke around!

AutoSite ‘Fresco’

There’s some early development with the next version of AutoSite. I’ll follow up on this in the future, but I’m messing with the UX a bit (such as a new global toolbar and status bar) and working in some quality of life enhancements. There’s some buggy early testing going on, and you can follow progress on GitHub.

Oh yeah, blog posts

As stated earlier more from me on the blog is in the pipeline.. some on my fancy printer setup in the coming month, plus maybe even that R61i post I’ve been teasing about since August 11, 2022. Maybe something entirely different!

This is all the stuff I’ve got off the top of my head at the moment, so sit tight, got stuff brewing again. It’s been all a bit sporadic with the mess from college, but it be what it be.

Thanks for sticking around. I’m properly out of Physics on the 11th. Then I’m seeing some folks, taking a little trip, and I might be able to finalize more stuff before starting fall semester in September. Which will be lighter this time.. hopefully.