Small Web September Check-In 2: Halfway House/Troubleshooting!

[enchantedsleeper]

Somehow, we’re already (nearly) halfway through the month of September 😱 Where has the time gone?!

How is everyone doing with their small webbing so far? The theme of this check-in is troubleshooting: if there’s any part of your Small Web September project that you aren’t sure how to accomplish, or maybe something that you worked on didn’t turn out quite right, come and ask about it here!

It doesn’t have to be specific to this month, either – maybe it’s a past project that you hit a wall on, or a future project you’d like to start. If you haven’t run into any issues yourself, feel free to offer suggestions to people in the comments who have!

Here are some question prompts for this check-in:

• How is/are your Small Web September projects going? Are you working on the same things that you put down in your Goals (if you decided to set goals), or something else?
• What do you plan to focus on for the second half of September?
• What’s an element of your project that you found unexpectedly challenging? Did you manage to solve the problem, or not yet?

As a reminder, this is the second 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 them, so you can add something at any time – you also don’t need to comment on every one or do them in order! The themes are a loose guide; all discussion is welcome.

For our previous check-in post, head on over to Small Web September Check-In 1: Links!

Comments

[althea_valara]

I've made really good progress! My goals were to finish porting over FFBE Season 1 and what I have of FFXIV so far, plus maybe start a replay of FFXI: Chains of Promathia for documentation purposes. Well, I have FINISHED FFBE Season 1! I'm tackling FFXIV today, and I did start a replay of FFXI:CoP already.

I'm having great fun writing Python scripts to make HTMLizing the files quicker. Very proud of the one script I wrote to automatically build links for the FFBE Story Events (there's like 43 story events; that'd be a LOT of hand-coding of links!)

Originally, I had just planned on leaving FFBE at Season 1, but I've found YouTube videos of the remaining seasons plus some of the story events I hadn't documented, so now I am working on documenting those, as well. Frankly, I've been putting a LOT of work into my site so far, but I'm having a blast.

I *am* having one problem with CSS. On the main FFBE landing page, I'm using <details> to collapse the (long) link list for each subsection. The link list is styled as, well, a list (some are ul, one is ol) and I can't seem to get CSS to apply to the list properly. I wanted the twisty for the Details to be bigger text, maybe 1.5em, but wanted the actual links to be at 1em, but no matter what I do, I can't achieve it. Leaving it for now, because it's not BAD, just, at the bigger font it makes the list l-o-n-g. This is on my local copy so hasn't been pushed to Neocities yet, as I'm still tweaking a bunch of other stuff before I push it live.

It occurs to me I should check how my site looks on mobile devices. It's using fairly simple HTML and CSS, so it should be okay on mobile too.

Link to my site: https://altheavalara.neocities.org

[aflatmirror]

I just checked it out on my phone; it's good overall! My only quibble about usability is that the nav links and menus are a bit too small to comfortably click on and read when my screen is oriented in portrait mode (landscape is fine).

I guess a div or somesuch gets scaled based on the viewport width even if that ends up making it smaller than intended? Perhaps when I'm next at my laptop I can read through the CSS to try and see what's going on (though, warning: my CSS was never sophisticated and is now a decade's worth of rusty on top of that 😅)

[matsushima]

I've done a little futzing around, mostly updating profile photos (and wig/eye/face-up artist links) on my doll site. I think I'd like to make real pages for my Licca collection this month, too.

communal_creators starts today and I signed up for the time challenge so I might do a little more futzing for that, too.

[tarlanx]

I decided to work on exchange challenges with close deadlines first and then have a small break this coming week to get a little site work done :)

[althea_valara]

Thanks for the feedback!

I checked it out both on my Fire tablet and my iPhone, and oh, I see what you mean. It looks pretty good on my tablet but I had trouble using the menus. On my iPhone it looked too small overall.

I've already made one change to be more responsive: on the FFXI main page with the icons, I switched from tables to a box model so there wouldn't be a horizontal scrollbar. It looks better! But yeah, I'm going to play with some media queries to see if I can get it pleasing for me on the phone as well as desktop.

[biteshelter]

I fixed the issue in my SSG that was breaking links! It turned out to be much simpler than I was expecting. I had just mixed up some variables. I also completely redid the sitemap generation code because it was a huge mess and debugging it was never going to happen.

The new index page design is in the works. I'm trying to make it mobile-friendly as I go. Hopefully, the mobile CSS I create for each section there will be usable on the rest of the site so I can make it all mobile-friendly.

I haven't made as much progress on the actual contents of the site as I wanted. I might focus on that for the second half of September. There's another web project I'm thinking of picking back up as well, but I don't know if it'll work out at all. I'd like to get some visible work done on my site first.

[ravensilversea]

Never actually got around to doing a status update last week 😅 But I had started poking around and trying to figure out how I wanted to format my recommendations, which went well for deciding how to (mostly) split them up and making a landing page/"site" map for them and went poorly in that I wasn't really vibing with the specific way I was formatting the recs themselves. But then I saw bookscorpion's comment last week about osteophage's bibliodex and went "Wait, that could work! 👀" And it did!

So the main updates I've done are posting the beginnings of my recommendations and my statistics pages! Plus fixing the navigation bar links for all the main site pages (I am Ignoring™ the fact I need to fix it for my fic pages rn) because I've renamed some page files which naturally broke the links. I also only got minorly distracted by making new decorations - I wanted some Steam-style achievements for my stats page- and exactly one (1) new fic got archived. It might be the same one I just published at the end of August, but at least I didn't add to my fic archival to-do list right? 😂

Of course, making a recommendations page means I need things to rec, and I don't have a backlog of rec lists I can just import. Instead I have 500+ Ao3 bookmarks and that's a bit much XD So I ended up stalling on my fic recs page for a bit. But a post has been making the rounds on tumblr about how we should be doing more rec lists, and I got the urge to do one. So two birds one stone, I made a rec list out of the fics I bookmarked in August and cross-posted that list to my site. And I think I'll try and keep doing that! Now I just need to figure out what other kinds of rec lists I can put together lol

[toothpastepancake]

How is/are your Small Web September projects going? Are you working on the same things that you put down in your Goals (if you decided to set goals), or something else?

Doing great! Some of my goals ended up not working out for me, such as the Mediawiki goal - turns out I actually hate using that software, whoops, it's not intuitive to me at all! However, I did manage to set up my otwarchive fic archive... somewhat sort of? I still need to figure out a problem with elasticsearch. Or why there are no user profiles... 😭 But omg, this is only the second thing (okay third I guess, counting the failed mediawiki experiment) I've ever self-hosted without help from Yunohost. I don't know how I did this and am extremely proud of myself for doing so.

What do you plan to focus on for the second half of September?

Getting my archive set up fully! I can't wait to have everything technical sorted out so I can work on the site customization. I'm thinking a buttercup yellow theme, since there isn't an OTWarchive site with that color yet.

What’s an element of your project that you found unexpectedly challenging? Did you manage to solve the problem, or not yet?

Um. Everything. Self-hosting is hard lmao. I haven't solved the search problem yet, but will likely try and start on it tomorrow.

[linky]

Best of luck with your archive!! Always exciting to see someone try out the OTW code.

[le_gaosaure]

I think I know what's going on with your CSS! Thing is, "em" is a relative size, and it's relative to the parent element, which means that if you have, say, your paragraphs in 1.5em, a link set to 1em inside a paragraph will display as 1.5 x 1 = 1.5em size. If you want to have a size relative to the base of the page and not have this multiplicative effect, you can use "rem" instead =)

[hojarasca]

I¦ve been working on a pokémon worldbuilding project which involves some pretty convoluted rules regarding signature moves and so forth. And initially I was trying to apply these rules by hand, but eventually it got to be too much and I kept missing things or making mistakes. So I found a dump of learnset data on GitHub and wrote a Ruby script to automatically generate the signature move data from that.

Somewhat relatedly, when I started this project I was keeping all of my data in a Numbers® spreadsheet and using a terrible AppleScript script to export the data from there into a T·S·V. This worked, but was really tempermental, partially because Numbers® support for AppleScript is really unmaintained at this point and I had to do some U·I scripting. As an example, the script could not actually pick where to save the exported T·S·V, so if you saved any spreadsheet in a different folder since the last time you ran it, it would go and save in that folder instead! (Because, apparently, Numbers does not remember the “last saved folder” on a per‐spreadsheet basis, which is bonkers.)

Anyway, to get around all of this, I finally made the jump and downloaded LibreOffice and converted my spreadsheets into LibreOffice Calc spreadsheets instead. LibreOffice¦s commandline tool, soffice is, like the rest of LibreOffice, very unpretty and cumbersome, but it does work reliably and you can hide all the messiness within a shell script, so that is what I have done. LibreOffice also gives you the option of saving as a “flat O·D·F” file, which is suitable for checking into Git, which is nice.

It¦s a real shame that Apple has stopped caring about writing good programs with featureful scripting capabilities that make users feel empowered at their computer, because Numbers is a much friendlier and easier‐to‐use application in my opinion. But alas.

I also split up my spreadsheet file up from one big file into multiple smaller ones, so that a change to, say, the Indigo League learnsets wouldn¦t force a rebuild of the page for Alola. This is especially important because the main “pokédex” spreadsheet, which shouldn¦t need to change often, is a prerequisite of the signature move script, which is very slow. It was a real problem when it was needing to regenerate all of the signature moves just because I made an unrelated change to one of the other pages in the file.

[qestir]

A few days ago I decided I'd rather use MkDocs than Eleventy to update my personal site -- I used to use hand-coded HTML but I'm old and tired and don't like doing that anymore. But the thing is, I like the way MkDocs works more than Eleventy, but none of the MkDocs themes I found really spoke to me. So I decided to make my own.

Desktop view / Mobile view (And there's a light mode variant as well)

I don't know if I'll package it for other people to install when I'm done, but I will at least make the code available to copy.

[enchantedsleeper]

Seconding this! I hope you can troubleshoot your Elasticsearch and user profiles issues - if you want help from people who've been there, the other peeps who've set up OTWarchive sites like Walter from SquidgeWorld can probably offer some thoughts? I think that SqWA also had some Elasticsearch issues, if memory serves...

Buttercup yellow sounds lovely! 🥰 Cheering you on to get to the fun parts soon!

[enchantedsleeper]

Ooooh, I like the recs call-to-action! I always feel like I should do more rec lists but I'm lacking in inspiration on what kind of theme to give them 🤔 I really like how you themed yours around fics you bookmarked recently!

It's great that the bibliodex template is working for you - looks really nice! I'm eyeing up your Untamed recs, which might pull me back into reading some Untamed fic xD

[enchantedsleeper]

Power to your exchange challenge completion! <3 I hope you have/had plenty of inspiration, and then enjoy taking a break with some site stuff!

[enchantedsleeper]

Oh, I came a cropper before when trying to switch to "em" for sizing - it looked the way I wanted to on desktop, but then on mobile it was minuscule... I couldn't figure out why that was. I found another way to get my desired effect, but I'll have to look into "rem"!

[enchantedsleeper]

Your doll gallery looks really nice! The layout and the design are awesome. And good luck with the Communal Creators challenge!

[le_gaosaure]

Hmm, I'm not sure "rem" would solve that specific problem... From what I understand (and apologies if I don't make sense, I'm slightly feverish aha ^^"""): pixels are pixels, so far so good. Em are a multiplier on the default size and "stack" based on the parent element; currently most web browsers display text at 16px if you don't give any size so this is the base default: 1em = 16px, but if you size elements inside other elements you will get the multiplicative effect. Rem are also a multiplier on the default size, and use the same size as reference so 1rem = 16px, but they don't "stack" because the R in rem is for "root" so it's always compared to the root element's default, not to the current element's default. So if something looks "normal sized" on computer and tiny on mobile with em, there's no obvious reason for rem to act differently. I'd be more suspicious of a size in pixels or % having sneaked in (and I can't remember how % work for size right now and I'm too tired to look it up aha ^^""").

[linky]

Still been very busy, so I haven't done any actual coding yet... And given how I will be on a trip soon for a whole week I don't know if or when I'll get any done this month. But I have figured out some inspiration for what my Gotchard webshrine to potentially look like, so there is that! As well as gathered some new buttons and other graphics to put on my site later.

[tarlanx]

Yeah... I feel overloaded with challenges/exchanges right now! I do need a small break from them but those deadlines keep crawling ever closer!

[finch]

I've not finished the big stuff but I've made progress, and gotten some little things done as well. Progress! Thank you for the check ins, even though I've had this open for days without replying, having it there does help me stay on track.

[matsushima]

I can't take credit for the template - I modified it off a free-to-use one from Affelius (Wayback Machine link because the site seems to have gone down).

[sleepyquail]

I've been chugging along slowly but surely on updating my fic pages. I've got through most of the FFXIV ships, but now I have the remainder of that fandom to do before moving on to Resident Evil. These are my biggest fandoms in terms of numbers of fics, so it's no wonder that it's taking a while! Although I did also have a break this week just gone because it was time for the FFXII Week event I run on tumblr, so most of my free time was spent making things for that and also working on my FiaB assignment lol.

The biggest thing I did while updating said fic pages was decide on how to lay out chaptered fics as well as fic series, and also how to do embedded art and footnotes. I like how they both look so that's all done now! And a good job too, because the next ship section to finish is Sartauvoir/Basch and that's p much all just one long series lol.

[enchantedsleeper]

Ahhh, yes, I did wonder about the live site, because it didn't look quite right for a place to get an indie web template. That looks more like what I would expect 😄

[enchantedsleeper]

I'm really glad the check-ins have been helpful! I'm basically doing the same thing myself xD I make a point of working on my site so that I'll have something to report in a given check-in but every evening I fail to get around to actually reporting it xD

But progress is good! Great going 🙌

[matsushima]

I went back in and changed the credit link to point to the archived version once I realized…