Small Web September Check-In 1: Links!

[enchantedsleeper]

We’ve reached the first check-in point for Small Web September! How is everyone doing so far? Whether you’re just getting warmed up or are already ticking off goals (or maybe you just found this and want to join – welcome!), come and share your progress in the comments of this check-in.

The theme of this week’s check-in is links! Earlier this year, I came across Coy (osteophage)’s link compilation in praise of links, which led me down a rabbit hole of reading various essays about the importance of hyperlinking and being a good steward of the web. This includes not making your own site into an effective dead end, but sending people on to interesting destinations via links that you’ve included there.

I’ve always been a lover of curating cool webpages and sites, but it struck me that I wasn’t actually doing much of this on my own little website – now, it’s a personal fanworks archive, so you could argue that linking out to random pages is a bit out of step with the purpose of it. However, it broadened my thinking about where I could start adding more links: from archiving rec lists to linking out to gifts that other fans had made for me over the years.

So, the discussion starter for this check-in is: how do you link, and to what? Do you have a link hub or set of interesting finds? Would you like to do more with links?

As a bonus: share some of your favourite interesting links (this can be anything from thought-provoking essays to just cool stuff! They don't need to be explicitly small-web-themed, although that's great too).

And of course, let us know how your Small Web September project(s) is/are going!

As a reminder, this is the first of four ‘check-in’/comment points that will be published during the event – you can check out the schedule and dates of these posts over on the event intro. There’s no cut-off point for commenting on these, so you can add something at any time – you also don’t need to comment on them all or do them in order! The themes are a loose guide, but all discussion is welcome.

For the previous kick-off/goals post, check out: Small Web September: Kick-Off & Goals!

Comments

[axolotls]

I'm in the phase of settling in now that I have more free time, and have mainly focused my small web efforts this week on summarising some discussion that was had about decentralisation so that it can be used for a project some people want to work on.

In terms of links, I'm still mulling over what to do with them when the time comes! I have a lot of useful resources in my bookmarks that probably should be made more publicly accessible. I've toyed with the idea of self-hosting something like linkding, or maybe just have tag filtering via CSS and checkboxes. I think with texts that involve a lot of self-referencing, like the summary I'm writing currently, I want to find some way of including links to make reading it easier, which feels sort of on topic? XD As for external links, I want to find a good visual representation of citations essentially, since I sometimes want to link things without always embedding them in the text in a natural way.

[enchantedsleeper]

and have mainly focused my small web efforts this week on summarising some discussion that was had about decentralisation so that it can be used for a project some people want to work on.

Oooh 👀 Sounds intriguing!

I've toyed with the idea of self-hosting something like linkding

I found out about this last SWS, and would also like to set up an instance of my own - maybe then I can finally keep proper tabs on the resources that are currently scattered across Firefox bookmarks, Chrome bookmarks, and random notes on my phone xD

I'm not sure what a good visual representation of citations would look like in practice 🤔 but I hope you can find a solution that fits your needs! ^^

[e_k_braveman]

Funnily enough, most of the stuff I got done is related to linking! I made an 88x31 button for my website, partially because it's cool and partially because I applied for a couple of webrings, which don't necessarily require that you have a button, but I'd feel awkward being one of the few without one. XD I used ezgif to put the individual frames together, because Krita didn't have an option to just export an animated GIF. Or at least my version didn't. :T Here it is btw!

As for linking in general, I already had some outgoing links set up before I even got to this stage, just out of courtesy. The page template I used, the background image and even an r/nosleep story that inspired a certain character are all linked. Ok actually, that last one isn't linked in the Characters page, I should probably add it. Also, this just reminded me that another character's bio links to the Wikipedia page of a historical figure lol.

In the planning stages for the website, I was actually thinking of having a separate page just for my inspirations/influences, 'cause there's definitely some niche ones I'd like to share with more people. Or even recommending non-fiction I've read to in order to have more grounded worldbuilding. It's definitely an idea for further down the line, since I should focus more on the actual art I'm making downstream of those influences, but I'm keeping at the back of my mind.

On another note, I did do one thing that's not actually linked to links (sorry, I had to), namely that I finally put my website code on Github. I won't share that since it has my real name on it, but I will share the Deploy to Neocities tutorial I used to have the updates I push to that repository automatically be reflected in the website. It saves you a lot of tedium.

[biteshelter]

What a cool button! I'm surprised you weren't able to export the GIF from Krita, but I honestly have no idea how the animation features work or how long they've been around.

I like the idea of having a separate page for your inspirations. Seeing what influences someone else's creativity is always really interesting. I try to keep links to what inspires specific things I make, but I hadn't thought about making a broader inspiration page.

[biteshelter]

One of the first things I got done was moving my art resource links to a new section on my link page. My plan is to add more sections, but I haven't decided which links to share yet. I also added the pages I've been working on to the site navigation bar. Something I'd like to start soon is an about page, where I want to put buttons linked to other small web sites. I have a design sketch but I need to code it.

Speaking of buttons, I made some for linking back to here! I put one on my homepage for what I'm currently up to, and another on my links page as an alt-web community.



Other than that, I fixed heading levels across my site, chose a font for the headings, and started drafting the first page of a new hobby/interests section. I've got sketches for a new index page in addition to the about page, and plans for updating the static site generator. I want to clean my code up some more before trying to add new stuff, though.

[e_k_braveman]

Mind if I use one of those on my own site? :3

[overmore]

Ah, links. The way we share things on the internet. I feel a lot of people on indie web love links as a way to share stuff in general, sites, resources etc, which is quite nice. I do like looking through them from time to time, though I mostly like looking for site links rather than anything resource-related or anything else. I already spend a lot of time doing things like that in real life, so online it's not my thing.

I have my own little link page that mostly has fandom-related links, some resource links that i really just use a lot when looking for stuff and at the end some random links to thinks I like that don't fit either categories. Call it a personal bookmark page except it's shared with everyone online.

I am actually not too fond of big links pages, it distracts me too much. Too much going on, I will get lost and forget what I was doing in the first place. It's a nightmare for an ADHD person which is why I do tend to just not do it unless I have to. Even bookmark navigation on PC is a struggle. I'm a person who doesn't like too much stuff going on on my screen and a lot of open windows with different links are one of the things that are not good for me lol. I keep mine mainly cause I know fandom nowadays is shit, it's hard to find events that aren't anti run and won't harass you for what you like outside of the event, so having links to events like that is important to me to show people that, it's still not all horrible. We're still doing something. Hand in there buddy!

Links can be fun, but in moderation cause it gets too much at some point.

[althea_valara]

I have finished copying over Season 1 from ffbe_script to my local repository; I haven't pushed it live on Neocities yet because I'm going through and proofreading them after a random look at one page HORRIFIED me with the amount of typos I found in a small section. I also want to write a primer for the last chapter, partially because a LOT happens in the season, and partially because my page directory has a blank page there.

To facilitate the copying/file massaging, I wrote a Python script that handled most of the HTML. I just didn't include a line in the script for doing the headers, but since the headers are in all caps, it was relatively painless to go through the files manually and put <h3> tags in around capitalized lines.

I had told some of my friends that I was working on my site and they said "you need a Github", heh. I do have an account or three there but don't think I have backed up my site there yet, so I'll see about doing that.

Links, huh? I have a brief tutorial squirreled away on my site for how I did the menu links; in a nutshell, the menu itself is written in YAML and then Jekyll magic turns it into HTML (Jekyll is a static site generator tool; I know others here are using a different but similar generator but I've forgotten the name. I heard of Jekyll first, so that's what I went with).

Most of my other internal links are hand-coded. I wouldn't be surprised if there is some Jekyll magic I could do to build those links, but eh, it's not a LOT of links so I don't mind coding them myself.

I... had not thought about linking OUT to other sites. I should probably, at least, link to the FFXIV wikis as they were a big help when working on my Main Scenario Quest "summaries". There's other resources I will probably use while building the site, and I should link to those, too. I hadn't considered a webring. I'm not sure if my site would be appropriate for one? As a reminder, my site is at https://altheavalara.neocities.org and I'm making fan scripts of ongoing Final Fantasy games.

[thatjustwontbreak]

Thanks for posting the menu links tutorial! I'd never heard of Jekyll before.

[finch]

I decided that the best way to make my links interesting was to take a digital garden-esque approach to them. In practice this means that most of my links are spread across my site, rather than corralled on a single page of links. Writing links are on the writing page, magic links are on the magic page, and so on. When I have a bunch of links on a topic, that usually means I have some thoughts on that subject too, so I start trying to put them together with quotes and my own thoughts into a more interesting, complex page.

So far this month I have found an actual webhost, reorganized and uploaded my files, updated my site and link pages a fair bit, and started working on the pages for my major writing project. It's not a ton of obvious progress, but I think it covers everything I need to move onto more complex things.

[axolotls]

Looks really cool! I like the way you've done that split, with several links pages! :D

(That said, the actual link colour has pretty bad contrast with the grey background... I can sorta read the links if I squint, but I know other people, particularly those with vision issues, may struggle even more with them, so it might be a good idea to change the shade a bit so that visitors can read the link text easier. ^^ I find this site to be useful to check if the contrast passes the web accessibility guidelines and fiddle with the colours a bit, though I think it's fine to aim for just AA compliance rather than necessarily AAA on all fronts. If you decide to do this, from my own fiddling with your colours, I think you'd have to lighten the background a bit to get good contrast without making the link colour super dark (and thus harder to distinguish from normal text, although you've got underlines to help, which are good practice for links!).)

[cennydd]

I got a lot done last week. Which is good cause I've got my mom visiting this week so I suspect I won't have much time to work on my site. One of those things is a links page. Most of my links go there but I do have a few scattered elsewhere whenever relevant.

One of the resources I found this week is this site that makes CSS gradients. I used it to design the backgrounds for this and this.

[finch]

Ooooh I love a good gradient! Thank you for sharing.

[le_gaosaure]

Progress is nope x')

Links... Well, for two of the four sites I mentioned in my intro, it's basically built-in: my craft archive includes a link to the pattern used on each project's page, because it's dang useful and I want to both be able to myself find it again and help others grab it; my fan archives directory is, well, a directory, so it's a bunch of links by nature. For my upcoming fan exchange, linking is less of a priority because the site aims to be a resource for a specific project that's limited in time, though it will eventually link to the creations made for the event (if the creators agree to it, I made that opt-in).

For my fic archive, though, links are... kinda weirdly handled, honestly. At first I had great ambitions of finding other people with similar archives and be friends and link to them on the "links" page I do have, but it's kinda flopped because uh... I'm not that social I guess? I have a few links there, notably to the fanfic webring and to my directory, but I actually have more links on my "about" page because I linked to every person who contributed something to my writing. These are not very small web, all in all, but it's still links ^^

One other thing I should probably mention is that I really don't like the very concept of using buttons to link to stuff. At best you can get the site's name and/or a general vibe out of a tiny picture, but that's not super helpful to know what you're getting into, so I'd rather use text for my links, and describe what it is and why it's on my page.

I still made buttons for most of my sites because I know many people will just not link to your site if they can't use a button, which saddens me.

[finch]

Being social is hard!

I have one section with buttons on my site, but for the most part you're right that buttons don't necessarily make sense. If I'm putting a quote or an annotation, it's much more straightforward to use a text link.

[tarlanx]

I've been so busy with other things this week I haven't even started on this :(

[enchantedsleeper]

Don't worry - neither have I, yet 😂 I did have ambitions of getting some things done over the weekend - I was planning to just HTML tag some fics for easy archiving later - and I was so tired on Saturday evening that I didn't feel like it xD (Okay, I did also get sidetracked with nominations for Festivids). Then on Sunday it took me all day just to get to this post, let alone anything for my site xD

You're in good company, but I hope you can find the time and space to make progress later! 💜

[linky]

Been so busy offline and drained of energy I haven't been able to work on my site yet. T_T Though I am hoping to work on archiving some recent fics this week.

In terms of cool links: I recently found some nice buttons and templates from the site Yatagarasu!

I also discovered these responsive layout bases which I want to use to help make my Gotchard shrine. And I'll always link 32 Bit Cafe's Resources List for the Personal Web as well whenever there is a chance to do so. It's an eternal favorite of mine.

And lastly I also recently discovered Ytoo! which is styled after old school Yahoo and has a lot of fun links.

[finch]

I hope your energy does recover this week! And those are some cool links, thanks for sharing.

[supermario128]

I’ve just been plugging away at small changes I wanted to do for my personal website, although I finally finished an article that I want to put up on it as well. Part of doing the article also involved figuring out a way to display content warnings; we’ll see if I like it enough or if I want to change it again.

I have a links page for general stuff (like programs/extensions I use, essays that I find interesting, etc.), but I also just link a lot in general in whatever I write (to provide a source for what I am saying, to be clearer about what I mean, to give context, et cetera, et cetera). I’ve been trying to be more mindful of making links accessible, mainly by removing the target="_blank" attribute that I was wont to use before and adding titles to be clearer about where the link is heading. I’ve also been switching to using footnotes and having a section dedicated to source links to be clearer as well with my linking.

Oh, I also used a tutorial on how to append icons after links from CSS { In Real Life }. (Although I personally went with a[rel~="external"] to select external links.)

Something that I want to eventually do is write the descriptions for the links on the Links page myself; so far I’ve just been quoting descriptions from the websites themselves. I also just feel like I can better organize that page, but I’m not quite sure how to do it yet...

[finch]

Can I ask how you ended up deciding to do the content warnings? Usually I just put it in a paragraph at the beginning of an article or post if I think I need them, but I'm curious if other people are more systematic about it.

[stepnix]

I'm pretty proud of my miscellaneous links page, it's got a good mix of sites I've found really interestng and a small button wall. I have other pages for linking TTRPGs, which I'm very happy with, and linking free games, which I'd like to expand more soon. The thing I feel weirdest about is the TTRPG page, I included a couple because I felt like they weren't as well-known, but they've gotten a lot more publicity recently... I'd like the page to tell people about games they wouldn't otherwise find, y'know?

[finch]

Are you thinking about taking down the ones that have gotten more popular? I don't think you'd need to do that necessarily. I took a look and the only one on there I'm familiar with is Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast, so you're still turning people on to things they haven't heard of!

[bookscorpion]

I hadn't laid out specific goals for this but I am now leaving the editor view of my link directory open in a tab and I have been adding things to it regularly.
I am using osteophage's Bibliodex template for this - I was looking for a tag to tag my links for better searchability, and the template was exactly right for what I want to do. I will probably split this up later into several categories ect. and I am already adding filter tags that are not yet active to the cards so that will be easier once I get to that stage.

I also figured out finally that the Gemini protocol browser Lagrange has an APK (scroll down the list to find it), so I installed that on my phone and now I can use Geminispace on mobile and do a post or two for ROOPLOCH, the Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge. I'm Bookscorpion over on Station (a place for people to set up personal blogs/capsules and dock them to the main Station site, pretty active).
Edit: the last two are Gemini links - if you want to be able to open these in a normal browser, you can use Smolnet Portal

[sleepyquail]

Ooh, I absolutely love your link directory and that code is super clean! Thank you for linking it, I might test it out for myself. :3

[caramarie]

I did not have a productive first week of September, but I used this post as a prompt to collate my kdrama fanwork recs on a page, which was a thing I'd been meaning to do :)

I don't have a more general links page, although it's on my to-do list. Mostly for sites I don't want to forget the links for, but which aren't in my usual set of open tabs. Like this Hong Kong Cinema site I love. I think I first found it via a Wayback Machine link, and I assumed it didn't exist anymore but last time I went to found out I worked out it was still around!

[stel]

i've been working on my links page recently! i made the decision a bit ago to consolidate my webrings and text cliques on my links page, since my index page was getting a bit full. i also had some bookmarks on my links page, but i'll most likely move those to their own page (it'd be cool to have a big table with checkboxes for filtering, maybe?).

i also have (had? may prune it) a uses page which i find very fun—it's cool to see what tools people regularly use! unfortunately i suffer from the curse of not knowing how to organize stuff, so i'll have to reorganize the page a bit if i choose to keep it.

i've also been making an effort to get my site on a few directories and listings! i'm currently on the responsive web directory, and i'd like to join the accessible net directory but i'm not yet sure if my site qualifies.

outside of my links page, i also have some recommendations on my reading page (maybe i'll do something similar for my watching page?) and links to some tabs i like on my guitar page.

overall, working on my personal site has been going pretty well! most of my roadblocks are just related to my indecision, which i'll get over eventually

[javert]

It turns out posting daily on Dreamwidth sapped my energy more than I expected (although I suspect getting nerfed by allergies was a big factor) so I'm late to the check-in and don't have much to report. I'm hoping the rest of the month will go better, but if I have to be honest, I'm not super optimistic...

I finished my fanlisting! It's up and running and has been addded to TFL. \o/ I'm probably going to update it with the new members I got sometime before the end of the week. I have to update my collective's index with it, too... So I'll probably do that at the same time. I'm pretty happy with it, although the layout isn't as tight as I would have wanted it to be. I've been fiddling with it for so long though, I have to stop messing with it, if only for a bit... I do want to tighten up the code at some point and make it more accessible.

Re: links, right now I just have a links page on my fansite. I'm planning on moving the non-Pokémon links to my personal site whenever that's ready. I like the button wall format, but I might rework it so the links have a description of their content, maybe in a table, later. It'd also allow me to link to sites that don't necessarily have buttons, which would be nice.

As for doing more with links, or having a links page that's more resources oriented... I'm not sure. Maybe it'd be something nice for my personal site. I'm bad at organizing the links I save from around the web, so it'd probably be helpful for me if nothing else. I'm 99% sure I've linked to it here before, but I'll still rep my friend marinehaddock's compiled webdev links from this year's Citrus Con, which includes links from my own stash.

[enchantedsleeper]

It turns out posting daily on Dreamwidth sapped my energy more than I expected (although I suspect getting nerfed by allergies was a big factor) so I'm late to the check-in and don't have much to report. I'm hoping the rest of the month will go better, but if I have to be honest, I'm not super optimistic...

Aw, hugs to you, that sounds rough <3 I can really relate - trying to keep up with any type of regular posting challenge is always tough going for me, as my patchy participation in the Snowflake Challenge and Three Weeks for Dreamwidth over the years can attest! So, congrats on doing all of that, and let yourself have a break as a reward ^^

Congratulations on finishing your fanlisting!! That's fantastic!! 🎉🎊 No matter how the rest of the month goes, you can feel accomplished about getting it done :3

I like that you've got banners for Lysandre Labs (as well as buttons) - they look great!

[annathecrow]

I surprised myself and managed to get the technical part of my September goal done! And so behold, https://annathecrow.net/ is live!

I even wrote a tutorial on self-hosting static sites in Docker. That was probably a waste of time, who's gonna read this kind of stuff here on DW? But hey, maybe I'll be surprised :D

This is probably more on the borders between small web and self-hosting. I still think it belongs though, since the form is small, if not the setup. And really, this kind of thing - a low-powered computer running a few Dockerized apps, including something public-facing like a static site or a blog - is really damn "small web", IMO.

[enchantedsleeper]

That was probably a waste of time, who's gonna read this kind of stuff here on DW? But hey, maybe I'll be surprised :D

Hey, this place exists, doesn't it? xD But also, a good resource is a good resource, and it can be shared around and linked to regardless of where it's published :D I love that you wrote up a tutorial on what you accomplished! And congrats on completing the technical part of your SWS goals!

And really, this kind of thing - a low-powered computer running a few Dockerized apps, including something public-facing like a static site or a blog - is really damn "small web", IMO.

Oh, absolutely it is. Besides, I don't think that self-hosting precludes something from being small web? 🤔 I'm pretty sure that's how a lot of people used to do it, back when the web overall was 'smaller'.

[hojarasca]

When it comes to links, there are a few things which come to mind…

1. A while back I came across aaron straup cope’s blogpost, continuous partial mythologies, which I definitely think is worth a read. But as far as this discussion goes, the important thing is that at the end of the post, it has a “This blog post is full of links.” disclaimer which links to a page that just… lists all the links in the post. I found this idea really interesting and think that with static site generators these days, you can do a lot better, and embed a list of most or all of the links on a page right at the bottom, maybe in a <details> element if you like. What I have done in the past is scraped the page during generation for links with a title attribute, and grabbed all of them and made their titles into the link text in the end.

   I think this is very use·ful, both to people returning to a page after reading it once (so they don’t have to hunt thru the page for a link they remember clicking), and also on the first read, since people may not want to break up their reading flow to click on a link and it’s good to provide another opportunity at the end. I of course want people to read the pages I link to (that’s why I link to them!), and having a list at the end of the page can help people find any that they have missed.

2. The second thing which must be stated when it comes to linking is that linking only works when people are good web citizens and make their pages linkable. A webpage is linkable if it has a URL which is accessible and does not change. In smallweb spaces sometimes people try to be edgy punks and go all “Cool URIs don’t matter who cares about maintenance or planning I’ll move my pages around every day”, but the people hurt by this are other smallweb folks who now have to go thru all of their links, find all of the dead ones, discover their new URLs, and update all of their pages. This is a lot of work and one of the biggest maintenance burdens to running a website, and one of the reasons that links pages stopped being a thing. It’s really important to put some planning and care into the URLs of your pages before you publish them, set up redirects for ones that you move, and generally do what you can to reduce the negative impact of your actions on other people. If 20 people have linked to your page, then by one URL change you have created work for 20 people!

   Anybody who has run a website for a long time and cares about linking probably knows the flipside to this, which is that the number of redirects that you wind up having to maintain just to keep old links functioning can grow quite large quite fast and be its own kind of pain. There are some techniques and bestpractices for reducing this burden, but the most important thing is just to consider “does this seed have room to grow and change” before you go and plant it in a cramped corner of your garden.

[grayestofghosts]

I admittedly haven't been doing much at all for this month because this month is crazy for me so I have not really been holding myself to it, but I figured that it would probably be a good idea to say something about this post considering my personal website is a linklist, and the background theory of why I think I need a linklist and why I generally advocate for everyone to have at the very least a list of links is because of the reasoning laid out in the essay The New Yahoo. Basically the writer explains that web search as we know it right now is unstable, so links to websites that are useful are being lost to SEO and now AI at a really alarming speed, and really the only tool most of us as individuals with little resources have is to save links. So that's kind of the philosophy behind my website, Punk The Frog's Linklist, though me adding in my own writing to archive is the side project that's also included on the site now.

A new thing that I've started that I have not been updating as much as I originally intended (but who does, with these projects) is a running articles I'm reading page, because while the 'useful resources' are nice, a whole lot of the internet is structured in the form of articles which are not quite so easily classifiable because articles are kind of meant to be ephemeral. So in this case having a disorganized running list of just articles is kind of a way to respect their ephemeral nature, maybe. Or at least, there's stuff that's interesting that if put on more permanent resource pages will eventually just be clutter, but I still want to link. If that makes sense.

Now that I'm thinking about it I think I want to link to more of the artists and writers I follow on social media, in addition to the resource focus. I am really not sure I will have time this month, however.

[enchantedsleeper]

At the end of last week, I didn't have any progress to show for my SWS-ing, but I've carved out some time during the week to poke at my site, and it's been really nice to get things done. Originally the plan was to archive some Superman fics (movieverse and TV, various fandoms) because that would be a new fandom category that would draw together some old and new stuff, including the drabbles I just worked on for Seasons of Drabbles summer round.

Instead, I wound up tinkering with the HTML on my fic page and decided to go ahead and create an 'Other' category for my one-fic fandoms because it will be neater in the long run if I can bucket them all in there. I've also started moving my unpublished WIPs into the main fandom sections instead of a separate section at the bottom. The rationale being: I have a bunch of WIPs already among my published fic, so the only difference with the others is that I didn't publish them at the time. But some of them I decided to house on SquidgeWorld years later, so... at that point, are they even 'unpublished'? This way, they get proper metadata, although I do have to come up with a summary xD

One of the unpublished WIPs I hadn't archived (but now have) was a Peter Pan fic excerpt, and so I decided to do the Peter Pan fics next, and now I'm having fun archiving those, including a cyberpunk AU that I serialised in bits and pieces on a dedicated blog. So that's been an unexpected trip down memory lane.

On links: I covered part of this in the check-in post, but reading the essays collected on Coy's site (and I didn't even get through all of them) really rewired my brain and made me much more aware of how, and where, I link on my site. I started thinking about links that would fit with the purpose of my personal archive, and I've now made a reclists section on my meta page (it only has two lists on it, but still! Recs!) to archive reclists that I've published. It was also nice to acknowledge those as a type of fanwork that I've made (not very many of, but I like the ones I have made). I'm also planning to link to fanworks that have been gifted to me on the site, although I haven't decided where that will sit yet.

I also plan to archive my ongoing fic archive/indie web resources list as a page on the site.

I want to give a link to This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web which I read around the same time, and which also rewired my brain, this time in terms of thinking about what type of content "lasts" on the web and how to make my site as light-touch as can be. This was what got me started down the track of minifying my imagery, which is one of my goals for SWS. I also replaced the links within my meta essays with archived versions, even when they were still live, just in case those should break somewhere down the line.

The related discussion on Hacker News is also a good read, with recommendations shared for good places to save bookmarks. It got me to download Joplin (purportedly an open-source Evernote alternative), although I haven't the faintest idea how to start using it, so I haven't done anything with it yet.

[sleepyquail]

I love your fic page, it looks so neat! Details really is the king of codes isn't it? XD I'm going to steal your idea to put one-fic-fandoms all in an Other bucket, maybe even 2-fic-fandoms as well, cos I have 10 of those in total and it'll just take up a hell of a lot of space otherwise.

[sleepyquail]

I successfully managed to work up a test page using the gallery code that enchantedsleeper linked to me in the signup post! I quite like how it's turned out so far and it looks good on mobile too which is nice. Not quite settled on how to do the captions - I think they look a bit clumsy after each section of pics but idk, idk. We shall see. I want to finalise the layout/appearance CSS so it gels more with the rest of my site theme and then start building up the gallery.

Although I'm undecided as of yet whether to make it paginated or have it just be one giant scroll down, because I have a lot of screenshots, and I mean A Lot, so it'll make the page GIGANTIC. But then also I'd have to figure out where to split the pages up and whatnot, so I don't know yet! I'm also a bit unsure about the mix of portrait and landscape screenshots, but I think it looks good enough for now - next step is to decide whether to host all the screenshots on neocities or on my imgbox account, which might be better from a not needing to make them smaller perspective. Much to think about!

For linking out, I have planned sections in my shrine pages to share links to fics, art and other related sites, and I have a credits page as well where I keep a list of all the code credits I'm using, but this post has made me want to make a single separate page full of links as well! I have a lot of bookmarks of reference things for photoshop, gifmaking, pose references, and coding stuff I've collected, but then I'm also super into indie makeup, perfume and other things (sex toys lol), so it might be fun to link out to all of those as well. I'm going to go and plunder these comments for ideas and inspiration now hehe.

[enchantedsleeper]

Ooooh, nice to see the gallery code working for you! \o/ It's looking great on my laptop. I like how you've done the captions; it doesn't look out of place to me, but I get that we're all more critical of our own work xD

A code credits page is a good idea! That's sort of why I made the indie web and fic archive resources list on my DW, so that I could reference some of the tutorials and resources I used to code specific features, like the vertically scrollable div on my homepage. It's nice to be able to grab a link if someone asks you "Hey, how did you do..." (And also to have the source just in case one needs a refresher xD)

[alaterdate]

I've been so busy/stressed out from work I didn't even realize it's September! Never too late to give my site some much needed focus though.

I have a links page on my site that could use some updating so I will start there.

Thank you enchantedsleeper for hosting Small Web September again!

[enchantedsleeper]

Thank you for coming to take part! It's absolutely not too late and I'm glad you've jumped in :D I hope you can get a bit of a break from work stress!

I like your links page - I will definitely be checking out the essays (I might have read one or two of them, but even if I have, it's time for a re-read xD) and I also like the look of the 'Computers Are Bad' newsletter, that one is going to get added to my newsletter reading rotation ^^

[craftyhobbit]

I used to do this on fandom sites that I created, but over time, I found that most of the sites I linked to disppeared and I couldn't find any replacements because by that time sites like facebook, twitter, etc, had become the norm, rather than websites people actually made. Commerical sites don't need me linking to them, newssites don't. There are lots of personal websites on neocities but the sites aren't about anything other than the creator and fansites don't seem to exist anymore now. There are fanlistings of course, but unless it has more on it than just a fanlisting, it's a boring site that doesn't do much and it seems that owning lots of them is the goal, rather than making it a good website.

[enchantedsleeper]

It's definitely sad to see those kinds of links disappear, although I've certainly seen people in the small web space (like this community) working on cool shrines and fansites, so there is hope! With personal websites I agree that it can feel a little odd to link unless you know the person. But there are also interesting resources, projects and communities out there to link to, depending on what type of thing you're after. I hope you find some fun links that have stuck around!