24-Mar-2023
So as I expand my site, and I don't think each new set of pages needs to be noted, I hit on a point where I realized that I should start preparing some extra classes for div elements. Up until now I have made a point to avoid div elements. The reason for this is I actually read the spec and realized that div elements in general shouldn't be used too abusively. There are other more appropriate elements to use in most cases. This means in most cases I have actually used those, but then I ran into a case where no existing element was appropriate for my goals, and as such I finally used a div element. In this case it is for PF2e rules. It is good to have this isolated for later reasons, though I am not happy with it yet.
I also went through and made sure my site wasn't going to randomly change how it looks in the future due to browser changes as my site now defines WAY more about the CSS than normal. Due to some of the weird stuff I do and have planned I need it to be consistent regardless of browser, otherwise some stuff just gets really weird. Another thing I modified is all points in the css that reference px now use em, this shouldn't change anything for most people, as before I defined my font size as 16px, well now the entire site is 1em, which was 16px on my desktop anyways, and then everything is relative to that
I also finally updated my default page to include the footer and a few other changes such as the title and favicon changes.
22-Mar-2023 Entry #2
I have reworked some of the site further, now games is in the den, blog is now library, and the Minecraft section is now the mines. Everything also now links back to the homepage as being "dark halls". This makes the site actually usable. The other new change is that the home page is actually ported entirely onto actually using the default css for the site properly. This actually makes it far easier to implement the crest into other parts of the site as well, as the needed css is in that file as a class. I also tossed in a footer finally. I then did a bit of work on the file structure, and therefore navigation, of the site a bit, mostly relating to the library. The biggest change however is the addition of the repository, which will contain all my TTRPG setting information.
The library and the repository are likely to be the two main sections of the site, and they are where the general thematic writing of the site as a manor someone is wandering through will be most prevalent. Already there is the begins of this with myths being described as murals on a wall. To make this information navigable I have also needed to toss in some nav elements, and use some ids on the articles. I also finally remembered that I could use relative positioning in my href. This means that now the site can actually be efficiently restructured easily if I ever choose so, or if I rename some of the directories I only need to edit the links above.
22-Mar-2023
I got a bit over ambitious at one point. Broke this entire place. Today, or rather last night as I type this at 11:35AM after starting this at 10PM last night, I began the process of reviving this old thing. Firstly, I absolutely hated the old colour selection and css. So I changed it all. I am also ripping out the navbar. It never really worked correctly. I have also decided that the site will eventually be navigated using a new system, and will actually host my TTRPG setting notes.
Part of fixing this place is deciding how much of my old experiments and content is worth preservation. The answer is... Not really much of it. Not to mention quite a bit has been lost to time. The homepage of the site for years was just a single string saying I broke it, but now it is something a bit less retina burning and a bit more interesting to look at. The crest that has been my icon for the past few years. I also have more monitors now, making development easier now that I am back at it.
My new plan is a new division of the site once I finish going through what is left behind from before. The game development corner isn't really functional and never was in a good condition to start with. So I won't do that anymore, as I don't really have time for it and it isn't worth trying to restore for legacy purposes. Then there's this blog, which has sat for a longtime with no content. That is actually something I will be able to fix the quickest. I always am typing up some form of musings, so I just need to start uploading them rather than keeping them private. Then there's the old Minecraft content. That has been rephrased to be past-tense, as I am no longer involved in that hobby beyond playing the game. The main thing is the new sections of the site. First is a page to all my links, the second is a section dedicated to my TTRPG setting which I mentioned. I will be rebuilding my setting for the most part anyways, so as I do so I am going to put it all on here.
Now this is actually related to the website, even if this is a few weeks or maybe even months old news now. My site no longer is http, it is now https. I got that all set up with automatically renewed certificates. It is also on a dedicated machine that sits on my desk now (thanks Spy), and has been used to host a Virtual Table Top in the form of Foundery as well as a Minecraft Server with Dynmap. I could link to them, but I won't, simply because there's no reason to do so, as I can't be sure if the dynmap will be up in the future, and the VTT goes up and down based on if I need it or not at the time. It was quite a pain in the ass to learn how to set up the apache2 proxies to get those working on subdomains, as well as getting DDNS set up so that anything would even work on here with ddclient. That was long enough ago though I can't remember enough of the ordeal to make an entry on it however. I barely remember how I did it, so it'll be a pain if/when I need to do so again. At least the SSL is entirely automated. I also have been using this site to handle my user directory to distribute files to friends and family when needed.
As for site navigation, the first phase will be to simply get everything accessible from the home page with hidden links tucked inside the ascii art of my crest, complete with cryptic terms for what goes where. Later I will decide how I want to enable returning to that page, as I got several ideas for that. For now, at least for the pages that are immediately returned to operation, it will be a simple link with fun flavour text.
24-Apr-2017
So after looking over this page I decided to update a few things about this site. First things first was look into making the site more responsive.
This turned out to take like ten seconds to make the page content behave, just a single meta tag was required. This was easily added into the defaultPage.html and to existing pages.
Next part was making the navbar behave, this was less simple, however after reading around I found a bit of a how to at https://www.w3schools.com/. Now I have been using both w3schools and MDN (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/) for a lot of the reading up to figure this out, as well disecting some webpages from other sites. From what I found at w3schools I was able to make the navbar adapt to mobile, I was also able to make it stay attached to the top of the screen.
For fun I moved onto something less... practical and more just plain fun. I decided to see if I could make the buttons on my navbar turn when hovered over. This was successful. You can see it above. I also tweaked somethings so that the header tag was used.
After that I had some fun playing around with the site's colour scheme. This took a bit of time to get right, but is pretty much the same site wide now. This meant making the article formatting site wide, and then making it look good with everything else. I set up some back up formatting for outdated or limited browsers, but for the most part the site should look a bit nicer now on all devices.
Due to limited time I don't have time to work on my next goal, which was site layout updating.
23-Apr-2017
So last time I sat down I didn't have time to look into iframes, since then I have done some research on my phone into this very thing. After some digging around into the issue I decided that JavaScript was WAY more reliable for my desires.
Now the reason iframes and JavaScript were considered for my navigation bar were because I wanted one navigation bar file for my entire site. That way I could easily modify that one file and only need to overhaul the entire site if I intended to rebuild the entire site for a new method of doing this.
After some googling I learned that jQuery could be used for this, so that is the method I decided to go with. Before I just took the code I found and implimented it without understanding it (which is fucking stupid to do), I sat down to read the documentation related to the code I found (you can see it if you view this pages source). This was for two purposes, one understanding of the code, two to find what was actually being called in the source code (that is right I went straight for the source code after seeing the documentation).
Once I found what I wanted precisely from the documentation I looked through the source carefully to see if it is worth extracting the jQuery $.get() function from jQuery itself. This meant going through http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js. After reading over all of jQuery code I could stomach, which was more than most people will believe, I decided that it would be faster, due to caching, to use jQuery as is than extracting and remaking the functions myself.
The reasons I decided to keep the functions as they are is simple, the $.get() function is actually just $.ajax. Depending what you feed it it fills in some details for you to save time, the important part of that though is the $.ajx() function returns a jqXHR object. This object contains all the information needed to nicely import HTML into HTML without breaking things. Extracting just the desired parts of the code was deemed a waste, as what I needed was already there and functional. It also would mean users would need to download my own version of a small part of jQuery, something that makes no sense when most people will have jQuery already cached from the Google CDN, saving myself disk space and the user time and disk space. Finally it gives me access to the entire lib if I decide I want it.
I do have issues with jQuery after reading its source, but I do understand how it works in theory now. I will add "Make my own personally jQuery like lib" to my todo list of projects after I learn webdesign. It was an excellent experience for expanding my understanding of JavaScript however, which is, while workable, been allowed to deteriorate through time unused and incomplete.
After I decided to work with jQuery for now I set myself to work on making a template page to work from with the rest of the website, this wasn't hard to put together for now, and I made sure that it was designed so that old content could easily be socketed into it when I upgrade a page to this template, as well as made this template easily upgradable, hopefully. The intention is that I will be able to pour my knoledge into this basic page so that I can, with some basic copy and paste, create a new page from it ready for content (such as the page you are reading) or upgrade old pages to use it.
This template currently includes the styling of my site, the navigation bar at the top, and a few things in place so I can go straight to work on the pages unique content. The page is easily found over at: http://squirrel-killer.ca/defaultPage.html. Nothing special to look at, but it exists for my sake and not for visitors. In the future it might look more interesting. Currently however it just contains a fairly plain navigation bar at the top and a black screen
This template does not contain the grey background on article elements yet, have yet to decide if that will be a site wide feature yet.
19-Apr-2017
This will be my first entry on my documentation of learning web design. I will just go over what I did and learned today.
So today I started tidying up a lot of my site. First I fixed a lot of my site wide styling. First by making everything nicer in css, then I began working on a site wide sheet. That wasn't pleasant until I learned about "<link>". Once that happened I quickly moved onto designing a navigation bar. For now I am trying out iframes.