…makes for a great improvement.
I recently had a bit of an epiphany on how to vastly improve how my portal page looks.
Category: Web
Counting more Art
So, the art-counter site broke slightly a few days ago. Nothing serious though.
I had just made a new drawing for the first time in quite a while (96 days) and when I added it to the counter I noticed that it hadn’t underlined the times and made them copy-able like it was supposed to.
Slight artjustments
In the previous post I detailed how the modifiers have the ability to multiply the score bonus which is how it worked when I wrote the article. About a day after writing it though I changed how modifiers work. I decided that the multiplication business was too complicated.
Now a modifier just has one value, this value is multiplied by the input (such as the number of characters) and added to the total. The minimum threshold determines if the modifier should be displayed in the log or not. There is no point printing 1 character to the log. But anything above that will show.
That’s pretty much it, except some minor adjustments to the interface.
More art-counting
Hello! Here’s another update about the art-counter system! Just in case that interests anyone besides me! (Seems unlikely)
Art for points
This entry is about how drawing something daily, which I realized I’d probably not be able to keep up with, lead to me creating a website for myself that would keep track of how much I’m supposed to have drawn.
This is the history of that site, and how it’s changed (pretty rapidly)
Arts
I’d be surprised if anyone actually noticed, but I removed the links to the gallery pages that were on here a while ago. Try as I might I haven’t been able to find a good gallery plugin for WordPress. Not good according to me at least. The best one I’ve found so far, and the one I have installed right now is NextGen Gallery. But while it works fine I haven’t been able to find one that lets you browse images in a way I like.
Hexagons
UPDATE!
I’ve changed how the bottom part of the page looks a bit. I think it’s a bit nicer, but not 100% satisfied with it. Not much I can do at the moment though since I’ve yet again run out of ideas for it.
I’ve also made the center hex do something. When clicked, assuming you have javascript enabled (which the rest of the page doesn’t require), a popup will appear with some contact details in it, such as my email address. The reason this uses javascript is because I don’t want my contact details stored in the page on load to avoid them being scraped by bots. Instead when the hex is clicked a request is sent to a simple API endpoint I wrote, that fetches them and fills in the dialog before showing it.
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Hey! I just updated my front page! By front page I mean the portal page at http://towerofawesome.org
The old one was one I designed early on when I first set my server up, and it’s stuck around since then. It wasn’t really bad-looking, but it wasn’t particularly pretty either. It used to be a lot worse, but I’ve changed a few things.
As you can see. Simple and functional. The logo used to be gigantic, taking up well over 50% of the page height, which was terrible design. But eventually I realized and fixed it, resulting in what you see in this picture. I was young.
One of the problems with this is that it looks a bit messy. The icons are uniform in size and positioning, but not in their colors and overall design. This makes the page slightly unappealing. And like I said there is no focus on myself, just links to my various sites, which does little to represent me and what I do.
The YouTube and it’s API
Like I described in this post I used to publish videos using an AutoHotkey script. Before that I did it manually of course, which worked fine when I only occasionally published videos. But once I needed to publish videos on time every other day (as my schedule was in the beginning) I needed an automated way of doing it. Thus I wrote the script, which in brief would read text files I would write containing the url of the video and named with the desired publish date. The script opened the URL in my browser on my laptop (not my main computer) and would essentially click the “publish” button on the videos edit page.
This worked for the most part, but sometimes the script would fail to publish a video, which wasn’t a big deal when I was at home and could have it retry immediately. But as I might not always be home, I knew I couldn’t continue relying on this script. And attempts to make it more reliable had failed.