Small Web September Check-In 3: Communities!

[enchantedsleeper]

Our third check-in point for Small Web September is at hand!

We're now on the home stretch - but there's still lots of time to play around with your small web project(s), so if you're just joining us, welcome! We hope you enjoy taking part and chatting with everyone in the comments.

The theme of this week's check-in is communities! There are lots of cool groups, forums, mailing lists, and social media movements for or adjacent to the small/indie web - I'm posting in one right now! These can be really excellent places to find like-minded hobbyists, share tips and resources, and take part in challenges and events (again, like this one :D).

So, in the comments, share how you're doing with your small web project(s) and also where you like to spend time talking about the small web, if anywhere! I'm not going to too-rigidly define what counts as a "community", so if you think it counts, mention it here.

As a bonus discussion prompt: what is something you would love to see/join a community for (this one doesn't have to be small web-related!) but you haven't yet found one? Have you ever thought of starting it yourself?

As a reminder, this is the third 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 and all discussion is welcome. For our previous check-in post, head on over to Small Web September Check-In 2: Halfway House/Troubleshooting!

There'll be a longer gap than usual between this and our next (and final!) check-in, which will be posted on Tuesday 30th September, the last day of the challenge - so look out for it then!

Comments

[matsushima]

I don't know if it's cheating but I would love to see more activity in allkindsofdolls. I'm the only person who posts there but I know there are other doll collectors/players/enthuisasts on Dreamwidth!

One loosely connected community whose sites I love browsing on the small web are alterhuman sites, especially when it's less about defining terms and more about sharing personal experiences. I guess you could put my paracosm page in the loose constellation of alterhumanity(?) but it's something I enjoy reading about.

[tarlanx]

I have accomplished it all! I made myself sit down and then spent several hours working through the screen captures and managed to get 1336 files reduced to 134, saving 1202 inodes that I can now use on other files. It is such a long and dull task, which is why I kept putting it off!

I still have two other TV shows that I need to reduce for this particular website but these are the BIG ones so I will have to tackle them just a few at a time when I am ready. Maybe next September...? *grin*

[axolotls]

I'm sill not sure what I want in this regard... I enjoy the Fandom Coders server a lot, both for discussions and as a place to get help when I need it. I've read some threads on the 32-Bit Café, but didn't really feel enough of a need to make an account and join in... This may just be my general shift towards lurking more, though. I feel more of an urge to make pages on my website talking about whatever it is I want to talk about, but I do enjoy hearing others' thoughts. Dunno.

[althea_valara]

I pushed another update to my Neocities site! I finished copying over and HTMLizing my Final Fantasy XIV "summaries" (they get really long towards the end of it, so aren't really summaries, lol). In the process, I redesigned my menus to simplify them. I also added some landing pages that had been missing.

So now FFBE Season 1 is complete, FFXIV is caught up to date, and I've made good progress on FFXI. Whee! I do need to look into my CSS sometime - someone, I forget who, gave me a tip about using rem instead of em and I haven't implemented that yet.

I'm away from home this week. I do have a computer with me, and I backed up my site to GitHub so I could, if I wanted, work on the site while away. But my computer's setup in an awkward area which makes it unpleasant to use for long periods of time, so I will probably not work on the site until I return home on Thursday.

As for communities: well, I'm in two Final Fantasy communities and have mentioned my Neocities project in both, but otherwise I don't have any small-web related communities.

[larissa]

I have completed my fic archive!

It's specifically for my Final Fantasy XIV fic, though I might make a companion site for my FF7 fic sometime as well, we'll see. I had a lot of fun putting this site together, although I cannot fully shake the weirdness of not putting the fic on the site. (I can't do it due to host restrictions.)

Regarding communities: I've honestly been really feeling the lack of communities in my specific space for a long time. For a good while the fansite/shrine community had a central hub in Amassment, but that's been dead for years and nothing has managed to return in its place. Shrines -- specifically old-school shrines full of tl;dr meta -- are still my favorite kind of site to make, and it'd be lovely to still have a place to chat about them specifically, but alas...

[finch]

I'm making some progress! Still slow, mostly because every time I think I know what I have left to do I find something else that I left unfinished last time I was working on it... oops. (I need to re-organize the art... I need to track down more stories to repost... I need to update my fic hosting/links, I thought I had those but apparently I didn't actually *do* it...

I got distracted making a garden space for folklore links, which wasn't even on my list!

Most of my chatting about small web stuff happens in the 32-Bit Cafe discord and discourse, sometimes here, and then sometimes the subject of making websites comes up in spaces primarily devoted to other things.

[linky]

I am on a trip right now and away from my PC, so I cannot work on anything new this week. However I did start coding more fic pages for future archiving and crossposting before we left. So I count that as a win!

[toothpastepancake]

Weeeeeee, I got my fic archive, Symphony, up here. I also bought a new server to deploy another archive on, this one will be more public and for femslash ships. After that... I'm going to learn Ruby and ROR so I can add more features to Symphony (which I'm basically just using as a playground right now, LOL.)

As for communities, I mostly talk smallweb on my self-hosted Fediverse account. I love the community on there.

[enchantedsleeper]

I checked my progress against my SWS goals a few days ago and I admit that I was hoping to have ticked off more things than I have 😅 But my goals for SWS were pretty varied and my actual progress has been mostly focused on a couple of areas. Still, so far I have completed:

• Rearrange my fic and fan poetry so that any 1-work fandoms are categorised under ‘Other’, and archive a few of these works, since they should be relatively chill to tick off ✔️

I did the first part of this and have so far archived two new fics under 'Other', with a third one formatted and ready to go up.

• Make a start on at least one new fandom, which can also be a ‘catch-all’ fandom like Yuletide (which I’m planning to treat effectively as a fandom for categorising purposes) or my small fandoms drabbles ✔️

I added the fandom Peter Pan to my archive and archived two new works under that fandom.

I have also made partial progress with:

• Finish archiving my Rurouni Kenshin fanworks

I have one work left to go. It's a 7-chapter multichap fic, so I'm putting off all of the fiddly 'jump-to' coding, but I've now archived several more of these and it probably won't be all that onerous.

• Clean up and make consistent my use of <strong> and <em> versus <b> and <i> across the site, because I know they’re all over the shop (this will probably involve a lot of find & replace)

I did this for one essay, plus I've made a point of formatting the new fics I add with the right tags, but I still have a lot of old pages to do; I should probably make a checklist.

Even though I haven't completed that many goals (I always tend to aim high with goal-setting), I am pleased that I've made a good amount of forward progress with the basic goal of "archiving more stuff", specifically fic, which I've really been dragging my feet on. I don't know what switch has flipped in my brain, but now I'm most interested in just formatting fic to put up (and it's only a question of which fics I choose for the honour), and since I've been trying to bribe myself into doing that for months and months, I can't say I'm upset xD

On communities: my favourite places to chat about the small web are Mastodon (which was my main source of fic archiving inspiration and community before I found more small web peeps through this comm) and here, where I post (sporadic) updates on my site to my personal blog and also - of course - hang out in this comm. I also enjoy taking part in marchmetamatterschallenge, which has been pretty good at getting me to make at least some progress on my site via archiving meta, and I can often carry that momentum on to doing other site work as well. Most peeps in the event are archiving to places like AO3 and SquidgeWorld rather than personal sites, but it offers company while I add stuff to my site and has also been a big inspiration for running this event.

Pillowfort also has a good cohort of small web enthusiasts, mostly focused on the Neocities comm, which I don't use much myself because I'm not on Neocities, but I'll reblog something there if I think it's of general interest and it's cool to read what other people are doing with their sites. The Small Web September tag also gets some activity during this event. Technically I also run a comm on Pillowfort myself dedicated to the retro web (for "retro" read anything at least 15 years old, give or take) but I've not been giving it as much love as it deserves 😅

[alaterdate]

I gathered all my various notes about website to-dos into a masterlist. There are a few bigger projects, but it's mostly editing and adding little things. I've checked off a few of the smaller things (like actually uploading book logs I had already written and formatted lol). I don't think I'm going to be able to get around to the bigger things any time soon, but SWS has once again been such a great push to get things done!

[faitsu]

Things I managed to do for Small Web September:
- Halloween BK
- Halloween Splash Page
- Christmas Background
- Portfolio 70% done
(I was also working on Yaoi Jam, so that too!)

Things I'm finishing up last minute:
- Halloween Blog Border
- Christmas Blog Border

Things I realized I have to make now:
- General winter design because I'm Canadian

[maevedarcy]

Hi! I found this community before September started but I thought I would not have any time to work on small web projects and I was wrong! I managed to import a total of 10 fics to my own website (only 146 to go ;-;) and I created two shrines: one for one of my fics and one for a favorite fic of mine.
I decided to comment here because I wanted to see if it was possible that some day we can have a specific community post about how to connect with people on places like neocities? My website feels lonely without following anyone, being part of any webrings or circles at all. It's like all the sites I browse are not about any of my interests and it's a little discouraging :(