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

[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.