smallweb | Smallweb Chatter Post

Trying to get back to putting my website together. I've mostly been pre-making pages for the future (fandom pages so when I need them, I gots them) because it's been hot and I've been exhausted and even dropping old fic into templates and adding line breaks has apparently been too much.

But I'll get there!

I've been stop-and-start on posting on

loneknight (it counts dammit) and I already need to catch up again on making posts on a small nexus which is kind of a thing. Oi. Not any closer to putting up an actual other webpage even if the nexus over on smol.pub does count in its own very special and minimalist way.

(the capsule version of a small nexus looks so much better omg)

That's really it, summer can go hang and it can take all the other Stuff[tm] with it.

I knew I'd probably slow down a bit during the summer but this is kind of ridiculous.

Yeah but this summer sucks.

I was annoyed at myself for missing the 1st anniversary of my site being created, on 1st July - a couple of months ago I realised it was coming up, and thought that it would be a good target to aim for to get a few fandoms fully archived and a couple of other things in place that I'd wanted to get around to. And then I completely blew past it 😅 I've been focusing on other stuff to the point that archiving just fell off my radar. Which is fine, but agh. The struggle to make time for archiving continues.

Still, I sat down today and accomplished a few good things including moving my unpublished WIPs to sit with my fic instead of meta (both were on a general "misc" page before), which I've been meaning to do. I also put some cute moths from absol's moth garden on my homepage, which was nice because I'd like to have more decorative elements there, but I've prioritised sorting out bigger things.

I really want to improve the readability of my fic pages with some nicer formatting, and then maybe I'll feel up to linking my site around more...

Ha! So I just went and looked and I missed the first anni of my site this last week. *facepalm*

The struggle to make time for archiving continues.

So much this. I like it when I'm doing it, but there's also the little hindbrain whisper of other things I could/should be doing.

(Oh, I'm going to be clicking on those moths forever, omg. Thank you for sharing them.)

Ha, high five for missing site anniversaries 😂

I like it when I'm doing it, but there's also the little hindbrain whisper of other things I could/should be doing.

Yeah, what I really need is a deadline or focal point that will motivate me to do what I can in the time available; March Meta Matters was good for that because I was focused on meta archiving for the duration of March, and then I decided to do a self-imposed "Archive April" challenge - which, even though I didn't do much in the middle of the month, got me working on my site at the beginning and end. I wonder if there are any small web events or challenges I could borrow motivation from 🤔

(Oh, I'm going to be clicking on those moths forever, omg. Thank you for sharing them.)

They're brilliant, aren't they? I'm happy to share the love! :D

I wonder if there are any small web events or challenges I could borrow motivation from

If you find anything, let me/the community know. I could use the kick in the pants. ^^;;

(or host something here, if you're up for it?)

You know, it did occur to me that I could make it myself rather than waiting for something to materialise 🤔 I'll give it some thought (and thank you for offering a venue!)

How about this: Small Web September

People can set a goal or goals of any kind for their personal website (or other small web-related project, like a directory or webring), to be accomplished during September (or it could run for part of September - but I'd like it to run for long enough that people can jump in at different times). Similar to March Meta Matters, they can share what they'd like to accomplish with their site at the start of the event.

There'd be regular points during the event for sharing progress, discussing issues and showing off your site/webring/other small web project. I was thinking there could be themed days, like Troubleshoot Tuesday (for discussing problems and offering help!) and a Follow Friday-esque rec day for resources and cool sites that people have found. And at the end of each week, people can talk about what they've been working on.

What do you think? Feel free to kick the tires a bit - I'm proposing to run this myself but I'd love to get some thoughts on how it sounds xD

I like it and think it's worth a shot! (I'm not sure if three posts? a week would be Too Much or not, but that is very much a me-thing.)

That's a good point! What about alternating the "Troubleshoot Tuesday" and "Follow Friday" type posts so that they take place on different weeks? (And they wouldn't necessarily have to be called that, but that would be the focus). So you get one "help!" type post and one progress roundup in one week, followed by one rec post and one progress roundup in the next week.

I agree it makes sense to have a bit less posting especially when discussions here are quite evergreen and so they won't disappear. I mean, I could just roll the two mid-week posts together and do one for help/recs each week... But I do like the idea of having a focus.

I think that would probably be better, especially on a slow-moving community like this one.

(I honestly can't recall how much advertising I did for this comm - I know it was mostly word-of-mouth/friends-friends - if you have any plans please LMK and we can combine forces/hit up a few comms.)

I'm so sorry for taking so long to come back to you here - my August became a bit manic, though in my head I also thought that it had been, like, 10 days tops 🙈 I am still absolutely invested in running this, though, I should say!

I don't frequent any other small web comms (except for fancoded, which I know you also know xD), but I am planning to make a post to my personal blog (for all the reach it offers xD) and also plug it over on Pillowfort and Mastodon, where I know there are some small web peeps (particularly on Mastodon). Hopefully there'll be some interest!

I should probably make those posts imminently, since September is almost nigh (😱) so I'll do that as long as you're happy to go ahead with the event happening here? ^^ Let me know if you want me to send anything like post outlines or... idk, anything you'd need. Also, I was sketching out a rough schedule of posts, and I think that I would probably alternate the end-of-week round-ups with the resource/troubleshooting posts to make one post/check-in point per week, otherwise it probably will be a bit much. So it would look like this:

Sept 1: Kick-off/goal-setting for the month
Sept 8: Resource recs (how-tos, nice-looking sites, webrings, the works)
Sept 15: Halfway point progress check-in
Sept 22: Troubleshooting! Got an issue? Post about it and get help, or offer it
Sept 30: Wrap-up! How did it go?

Edited (Fiddled with the dates a bit, since I was originally imagining one weekend and one mid-week check-in post, but then I realised that makes everything really unevenly spaced...) 2024-08-24 16:19 (UTC)

No worries, mine has been... interesting times. ^^;;

Anyway, I am totally cool with this. I'll probably drop links on

fictional_fans, which has had some conversations on archiving, and maybe

dw_community_promo? (Unless you want to, I'm not trying to step on toes.) When you post on Masto/Fedi, tag me in, please if you can!

But yes this all looks good, I am very excited. ^_^

Commiserations for interesting months, I hope yours gets significantly less so <33

That sounds great to me!! Please do go ahead, I'm really happy to have promo support 😄❤️ I've also thought that I could drop a note in

fandomcalendar (and the PF equivalent) since it's of interest to fans who have personal archives, shrines, etc (or want to make them)!

I'll be sure to tag you on Fedi and drop links to the other posts, too ^^

I saw your

fandomcalendar post, boosted on fedi, and I've posted to

fictional_fans and

dw_community_promo. I'll get

fancoded maybe tomorrow (I don't want to totally spam people, lol)

Thank you very much! <333 That's awesome. (I see the fancoded post too :D) It seems like people are excited to take part! It's really nice to see ^^

There's so much energy around this. Thank you so much. ^_^

Yes! I'm honestly just really stoked that people want to take part - no thanks needed at all <333 I've wanted to organise something (like an event or even a comm) for a long time, so it was really nice to have a prompt and the encouragement to do the thing ^^

Also, when I went back to the community homepage to make the kick-off post, I did a double-take because suddenly there are several new posts! So exciting! :D

Edited 2024-09-01 02:15 (UTC)

I realised it might be a bit tricky to plug the event without some details to point people to, so I took the liberty of making an intro post. I hope it reads okay and is as you expected!

I've also made a promo over on my journal ^^

\o/ Fantastic! I'll see about some further promo after work. I'm so excited. ^_^

Thank you! So am I! :D *\o/*

I had a close call yesterday when I initially went to make the post on my DW and input my archive URL instead, then received a message saying "This website is no longer online because the hosting plan has expired". I immediately "!!!!" to my partner, whose hosting plan it is, and he was very "???" because the hosting plan is meant to (and normally does) auto-renew. We're still not sure what happened there 😅 We're also travelling at the moment, and my fear was that he might not be able to renew it until we got home, which would mean I'd be running a chunk of Small Web September without being able to do anything to my own site XD But all was well, and the site came back up almost immediately. 😮‍💨

Ack! Weird... I've had Neocities hiccup on me a few times and make me panic, but at this point it's kind of what I expect for the web in general. (There's somewhere that I get stuck in a Cloudflare loop half the time on mobile, too.)

Maybe someone's cat ran across the keyboard... /only half-joking

We finally did get to the bottom of what happened with the hosting plan 😂🙈 When I logged into the control panel to start work for SWS, I saw an announcement from July about price increases for hosting plans - which mentioned that auto-renews would be cancelled as a result and would need to be manually re-upped for the new price system. (I've gotta say, I feel like that's not great from a site preservation perspective as I'm sure a lot of sites would have gone down if they're not being monitored too closely, though I suppose it's fair to not just assume that people are on board with paying more?) Apparently an email was also sent, which my partner obviously missed. xD Given that he has a bunch of other sites on that hosting plan, it's a good thing I noticed when I did...

I feel like that's the opposite of what a lot of companies do but at least it's taken care of now. ^^;; I hope it wasn't too much of a bump.

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