2023 Changelog Archives
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- Created the Focus First Webring (JS)! If your site minimizes distractions, then swing by and consider joining. There's also a directory option available if you'd prefer to avoid putting any Javascript on your site.
- Added Sibling Cat to the poetry stream.
- Tweaked index page navigation: Projects is now (more accurately) Articles.
- Added a Webrings (JS) page.
- New favicon!
- Added Please Let Me Use Reader Mode.
- Swapped the index page to PHP so I could make a conditional redirect work as intended.
- Switched to a (mostly) system font stack. If you want the old fonts, then install Libre Baskerville and Atkinson Hyperlegible; both are free for personal use. Incidentally, if you have Dyslexie or OpenDyslexic installed, then you should see the site in those fonts instead.
- Added The Vampyre to the poetry stream.
- Added two pixel cliques to the buttons page.
- Added Catalogue to the poetry stream.
- Added Thoughts on Inaccessible Design.
- Updated just about all of the stylesheet pointers as part of an effort to organize files a bit better- hopefully nothing breaks. Something probably will.
- Finished porting all link pages over to the new bookmarks page, then made it accessible for viewing. I also learned that the number of links I have up on this site's resource pages is in the hundreds, which means that this was a very overdue project!
- Guestbook security improvements.
- Fixes and improvements to the bookmarks utility.
- Added Bookmarks PHP Script (download): a PHP bookmarks manager that I've spent the last few days working on! Sample instance here.
- Started the long and tedious process of moving all links into my own instance of the script.
- Added a new page to Pointers.
- Added Evening Haiku and Polymorph and Man to the poetry stream.
- Added Upload Your Site to Neocities and a Remote Host at the Same Time.
- Added two more pen reviews: the TWSBI Eco and the Lamy Al-Star.
- Added more secrets.
- Added a new site button option; there's now a colorful version and a new, "paper" version based off the site colors.
- Added a Guestbook.
- Added Secrets; have fun finding the right words! I'll be hiding keywords throughout the site as I make secret pages.
- Moved list of operating systems from Tech Resources to Operating Systems.
- Tweaks to Index page header.
- Changed the radio page to loop audio files once they've been started, largely because I kept getting annoyed that they didn't loop when I listened to them on the go. Stopping them as usual should end the loop.
- Added To the parents of the child I met at work today to the poetry stream.
- Finally started chapter 4 of Pointers! I was really struggling with where to go next with it, and I think I've finally got a loose direction. We'll see how it pans out.
- Fixed dark mode header text weirdness.
- Improved mobile usability for the Projects page- the header should be smaller and less obnoxious now.
- Routine security checks- this site gets an A+ in Mozilla Observatory!
- Added You Should Care About Accessibility.
Reverted the header/footer image after sleeping on it and concluding that I like the old one betterNevermind, I changed it back again. I might need to draw a new one up from scratch at this rate.
- Trying out a new header/footer image.
- Compacted duplicate color variables. Hopefully this won't introduce bugs (it probably will).
- Added Microwave for Five Minutes.
- Tested and fixed issues in high contrast styling.
- Assorted bug squashing.
- Added Thoughts on Being Moved.
- Added explicit CSS for high contrast mode- still figuring out how to test this properly, but I think it should work.
- Added Using rsync to Push and Pull Website Updates.
- Added a "currently vibing to" section to the About page. Why not?
- Un-broke a lot of pages; I changed up how stylesheets work a little on the backend (HTML linking of colors, not CSS import) and bungled the sheet order when implementing it. I think I've gotten through most or all of the broken pages now.
- Added Anxiety : Hunger : Machinery to the poetry stream.
- Overhauled the index styling again... I know, I know. I'm figuring out what I want by trial and error at this point.
- Continued character work. Wrote my first proper Javascript for a page (unpublished so far)- it does work perfectly well without JS if you prefer to block it, and it'll be clearly marked.
- Added a buttons page!
- Did you guys know that inline elements have a gap between them by default, and all the ways of preventing this are at least a little cursed? I didn't. What? Why?
- More corrections for smoother printing.
- Behind-the-scenes tweaks to print styling: most of the article back to top links shouldn't pop out of your printer now, and titles take up a bit less space so you're not wasting a massive chunk of paper.
- Added Roadkill to the poetry stream.
- Completely restyled the index page now that I have enough of a grasp on flexbox to have some fun with it. May be buggy while I test things and find where it breaks; may also change as I refine things.
- Added Recommended Reading.
- Added Church Ghost to the poetry stream.
- Added a slew of words to the About page.
- Added a free CSS file I made to make plain HTML pages easier to read. You can find it on the Projects page.
- Continued character profile work.
- Continued section tweaking for resource pages to make them easier to sift through.
- Fixed background color weirdness in the first chapter of Pointers.
- Upped html border thickness for chapter 3 of Pointers (going for a subtle closing-in effect compared to chapter 2).
- Borrowed header formatting from my character profile styling. Shaded backgrounds are great for visually distinguishing them from surrounding text.
- Added a bunch of brain resources and tweaked sections for that page; it should be easier to find tools now.
- Ongoing character profile work.
- Added Human Microscope to the poetry stream.
- Added Thoughts on Asking Yourself Why.
- Added the (unfinished) Character Index.
- Added color palettes to the Projects page.
- Reduced repetition in stylesheets with @import (didn't load as a separate file because I'm not doing that kind of backediting torture to myself and it shouldn't be a major performance hit in this case).
- Optimized the grilled cheese image file- why was it over 2000px wide? I don't know! Now it's not.
- Added How to Give Your Website a Dark (or Light) Mode With CSS.
- Finally fixed index spacing thanks to an excellent article explaining Flexbox.
- Sectioned this log in preparation for creating an automated updates RSS feed (in addition to the Projects one).
- Added Thoughts on Webmastering and Growth.
- Started implementing server-side includes to save effort when changing navigation in the future.
- Stylesheet optimizations.
- Changed web hosts to NearlyFreeSpeech.net. The index and sitelog will still be available here, and I'll redirect the index to the new host. I finally hit a wall where I needed more features than Neocities offers (I want to play with PHP and includes to save effort maintaining pages). I'll keep the Neocities account up because I love the discovery aspect, and logs should still be stored here as well so folks can see updates easily. As for the site itself, nothing should change aside from the hosting location! The same old URLs should still work. You might see teething issues while I figure out git, but that should be all.
- Age disclaimer page tweaks (some for brevity, some because I swear more in stories than I'd anticipated).
- Added a section for minors to the safety page.
- Added Monsterf*cked to the poetry stream.
- Minor tweaks to About page FAQ order and website info.
- Added the the process: decaydreams to the radio page. I've been working on this one for at least a month.
- Remade the Old Music Megamix because it was somehow nuked? I have no clue what happened, but most of it was dead silence except for two songs right at the end. Ended up reworking it anyway; included songs are now arranged by date from 2015 to the present.
- Rearranged the order of chapter 3 of Pointers.
- Added yet another page to Pointers (Graveyard).
- Added another page to Pointers (Sisyphus).
- Overhauled the about page and combined it with the FAQ.
- Updated commission info; refreshed its style, filled a slot, and added album art commissions.
- Added Brain Resources and moved bookmark pages to Projects (still available via Pointers as well).
- Implemented iframes for sitelogs- they should be on the index and the dedicated sitelog archive page now. No more updating 2-3 pages every update! A little refining to do with styling, but it should be functional.
- Reworked the radio page- it has its own layout now (and I'm fairly proud of it- that central box will scroll once I get one more file in there!
- Added Overclocked to the poetry stream.
- Added "open in new tab" links to article pages for those who prefer not to use the new viewer page/want to link straight to an article.
- Assorted bug squashing efforts.
- Completely overhauled the Projects page and made it into an article viewer (which also involved manually overhauling all the article pages... augh). I've been playing with iframes as a way to make the site more easily maintainable, and I figured this was a reasonable place to start testing with minimal impact on the rest of the site. Things will almost certainly be broken for a little while while I iron out the kinks- sorry! I'm working on it.
- Added a few more pages to chapter 3 of Pointers/Amnesis. I really need to give this thing a proper title.
- Added How to Get Better at Anything.
- Added Friendships of Opinions.
- Continued work on Amnesis- chapter 2 is done except for one memory I need to write (not a super important one), and I've got the first few pages of chapter 3 up! It's formatting funkiness time, folks. Already learned a few new CSS tricks making the second page of chapter 3.
- Backedited the earlier Pointers entries for canon conformity now that I know what's going on. Downsides of writing without a plan! (Upsides: it's fun)
- Added Thoughts on Electronic Music.
- Added a subtle gradient over the site after poking at Freckleskies's CRT effect to see how it worked (the magic words are
pointer-events: none;and:before). - Continued work on Amnesis. More memories, a few snippets of present-day, and a much better idea of where things are going.
- Mucked around with styling, realized I liked the results, and proceeded to break a large portion of the site (and subsequently started un-breaking it; if you see a problem, I'm working on it!).
- Continued work on Amnesis. Added several new memories and tweaked a few old ones accordingly; I've been writing this as I go, so expect a lot of this sort of editing as things start coming together.
- Continued work on Amnesis. Rewrote two pages and added a new one.
- Started work on "chapter 2" of Pointers, Amnesis. Quite a bit there already! Needs some refining here and there, but I'd rather have a working draft up and go back later. Honorary theme song: So Just Hang On, Beautiful One by Au4.
- Added Liminal Spaces and more hidden memories for Pointers.
- Hid several memories inside of existing Pointers pieces. You're hereby invited to a scavenger hunt!
- Continued Truth.
- Added Wanderer.
- The last few updates are part of an idea I had recently- to weave a story into the entire website through links scattered here and there. I need to come up with some way to mark them as part of the same story and either suggest an order or write this as order-agnostic, but I'm having a ton of fun with this.
- Added Truth.
- Used Flexbox (badly) to make the index footer finally cooperate and stay down on both mobile and desktop. Definitely need to clean up the style after that, but it works! I'm still puzzled about why padding broke mobile while I was working on it.
- Added the old music megamix to the radio page.
- Published session ten of Eona.
- Added more birds to devices with wide enough screens.
- Added another free site template featuring cheerful pink colors and a sidebar. Check it out here if you'd like- this was my excuse to learn flexbox.
- Fixed a major stylesheet issue with dark mode- huge thanks to kph for reporting the bug and helping me troubleshoot.
- Updated the About page to include information about the website.
- Added a diversion to the 404 page.
- Added a little guy to some of the main pages. :)
- Figured out scrollbox snapping.
- Added print styles- if you ever print a page, then it should save some ink now compared to before.
- Added Thoughts on Webmentions.
- Updated and added information on spirits and gods in Eona. I connected some dots while I was bored yesterday and had to update accordingly.
- Published session nine of Eona.
- Added a short prologue to Eona. Nothing too important to the story (so far), but a way of segueing into the game.
- One update to Eona is going to take a while longer than expected; I'm planning to draw it and put up a video. Not this session and probably not the next, but it's coming soon.
- Added more information to Safety: why different practices matter, and some information on safety when legal risks are at play.
- Added a free site template! It's got a fun background animation, so swing by and take a look if that sounds interesting.
- FAQ updates.
- Happy Pride!
- Stylesheet review day: all colors have been moved over to CSS variables for easier maintenance/less repetition. I've also cut out some redundant and unused lines. Here's to hoping nothing breaks!
- Added information on gender and sexuality conventions in Eona.
- Published session eight of Eona.
- More animations- open a
detailstag in the FAQ. ;)
- Started playing with some simple CSS animations after seeing Pencilvoid. If you'd prefer not to see these, then I have it set to respect reduced motion settings.
- Published session seven of Eona.
- Wrote up a decent chunk of worldbuilding/lore for Eona; I've been meaning to give some details about the world and finally got around to it.
- Added a featured projects section to the Projects page.
- Published session six of Eona.
- Started doing some back-editing of the first few Eona sessions for better pacing and dialogue now that I have a better idea of who Kel is and how she tends to behave- that's why scenes have been getting longer, incidentally. I'm finally getting back into a writing groove.
- Added scrolling changelog to the index. I'll keep the last five major entries there.
- Overhauled sitelog archives; they're now sorted by year by default, with the main sitelog page acting as a link hub for the years.
- Small tweak to Crash because the repetition of "floor" was bothering me.
- Published session five of Eona. Had a lot of fun with this one.
- Tweaked Essay; I played with spacing a while back and loved it, so I've uploaded that version as an image. The alt text reads as a prose poem instead, which honestly works well for it. It gets the feeling I wanted either way.
- Added Crash to the poetry stream.
- Took down
Antipsych: How Mental Health Communities Can Go Wrong. Long story, but the short version is that someone's feedback let me know that I missed my point and shared more than I wanted to. I'm more comfortable taking it down and replacing it with a new page that has the main point I wanted to make. - Added Thoughts on This Website.
- Removed Dwarf Fortress Diaries from the projects page. It's still accessible through the sitemap for now, but I have no plans to continue it at the moment. Turns out that I prefer playing Dwarf Fortress without logging it all.
- Added Safety.
- Fixed the link navigation thing so it doesn't need
smalltags. - FAQ and About tweaks.
- Published session four of Eona. Finally, a session without any combat!
- Added a section to
Antipsych: How Mental Health Communities Can Go Wrong.
- Finally released my first radio music file- it's a solid half hour of soothing sounds that I originally made for dealing with sensory overload. It's pretty good background sound for sleeping as well! Completely free on that page, so feel free to swing by and listen.
- Moved
Antipsych: How Mental Health Communities Can Go Wrongout of the Assorted Thoughts and expanded it into its own article. I had a lot more to say about what happened and figured it was worth making into its own page. - Index formatting tweaks.
- Removed the Yay!Gender form from my About. As nice as it is, it's visually cluttery to me and I couldn't make it work.
- Added Thoughts on Boredom.
- Updated the site button. No more outdated site name!
- Index styling tweaks (mostly spacing and a little rearranging).
- Tweaked web rating owl alt text and moved most of it to a figcaption.
- Added more information on the age recommendation.
- Switched over to the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, as GPL-3 is worded weirdly for websites. It's more intended for software. CC does cover websites, does what I want it to (lets folks use code and writing as long as it's attributed), and is widely-accepted and well-backed.
- Added a web rating owl (
will probably make my own rating image at some pointmade my own image because it's a good idea that strikes a nice balance between "warn for all content ever" and "don't warn at all"). - Added a Yay!Gender form to my About.
- Published session three of Eona, which I had way too much fun naming (Rocks and a Hard Place). Fudge mechanics are still working well with Mythic! I think that I've found my winning solo TTRPG combo: rules-light enough to play without constantly checking books, but enough structure and story aid to keep me on my toes.
- Fixed the link in the last sitelog- it now leads to session two, as originally intended.
- Published session two of Eona. I pulled in Fudge mechanics for combat this time around, and I'm a lot happier with how fights flow with that in the mix.
- Tweaks to the FAQ.
- Wrote Afterwards.
- Added some green to the site header. We're going for "mossy tree", folks!
- Changed how the two newest articles are marked on the Projects page; it's now shown with a superscript.
- Changed the index page greeting text from "You've reached the home of Owl" to "Birds, words, and weirdness galore."
- Fixed the CSS mess on the Arclight page.
- Site recolor- been debating for a while and finally went for it. The blue always made my eyes hurt a bit, and I finally found some browns and yellows that I like enough. Besides, it fits the owl theme better. :P
- Setting information and session one of the Eona TTRPG logs are published! An unlucky scout gets tangled up with forces much larger than she'd expected.
- Added the Poetry Stream.
- Uploaded the TTRPG WIP so that I can work on it across devices without emailing it to myself.
- Drop caps!
- Cleaned out an unused class.
- Prep for uploading logs of a solo TTRPG.
- Day 3 in the CSS jungle. Went at a particularly lush thicket of redundant CSS with a machete, cut out most of it. (Spent a while cleaning up the site's CSS and trying to improve the whole situation there; I've got two years of caked-on kruft to chip off and comment)
- Continued work on CSS.
- Added a dark mode! Thanks,
prefers-color-scheme. - Fixed CSP header errors.
- Alphabetized Project sections.
- Switched the index owl banner to an svg.
- Updated commission pricing.
- Made the header into the Home/index page link; multi-file search and replace is making my life so much easier for these sorts of changes.
- Switched up what's linked in the navigation header.
- Added the music releases list.
- Added site paths to most pages- thanks to motherofharlots for that idea.
- Moved the link to my Bandcamp to the projects page; also linked the radios page there (even though there's nothing on it at the moment).
- Updated About That Journaling Thing. Aside from my journaling system having changed, I wanted to trim the article down. I cut a lot of unnecessary sentences, rewrote the introduction, and generally cleaned it up.
- Created a page for the music project I'm working on. It's not done, but that's some prep out of the way.
- Added Thoughts on Uncertainty.
- Minor updates to the coping resources zipfile in preparation for another zipfile's upload (one containing images that are helpful for various issues).
- Fixed some CSP headers.
- Not a site update, but I wanted to share that I'm working on a 20-30 minutes' length music file that'll show up here eventually. I started writing it for days where my other music is painful to listen to, then figured I'd extend it and release it for anyone else who sometimes feels like sound stabs them in the brain.
- Stylesheet overhaul. Had to update site page headers to make the header background tile properly.
- Added Interviews are Hell (but here's how to be the devil at them). Trust me when I say that this isn't serious advice (unless it is, in which case: I'm so sorry for you).
- Added a Humor section to the Projects page- I plan to write more pieces like this.
- Removed About from the header. The link can now be found in the FAQ.
- I'm trying to make this site more focused on writing and projects than just myself, so it felt right to move the About page to the FAQ. It can still be found easily there.
- Added Thoughts on Resin.
- Corrected a major typo- the Fisher Space Pen is not made by Zebra. It's (unsurprisingly) made by Fisher.
- Added Song Lyrics (if you want some song recommendations, here you go!).
- Alphabetized the sitemap's Articles section.
- Rearranged the FAQ and tried to cut out redundant questions.
- Added a page on troubleshooting resources.
- Added Thoughts on Being Wrong.
- Shared a way to bypass Windows 11 hardware checks in the computer journal. I'm not a fan of Windows, but sometimes I have to slap it into a virtual machine (looking at you, MS Access). This trick came in handy.
- Added Thoughts on Friend-Therapists and Boundaries.
- Added Thoughts on Communities and Cognitive Distortions. If you engage in a lot of online communities, I'd strongly encourage you to read this- it's short and it might save you some pain in the future.
- Summarized today's brief printer struggle in computer journal.
- Added Thoughts on Healthcare.
- Added sample songs to commission info page.
- Minor FAQ tweaks.
- Took one old article down from Projects due to gender screwiness and comfort reasons.
- Added Interviewing ChatGPT is like extracting nails from a brick wall.
- Alphabetized the Projects page (within reason; Other is still last) so that I don't need to think about where new articles go.
- Rewrote the About page, removed relevant content from the FAQ. As much as I love a long ramble, I wanted to change to something short and sweet after reading So you want to create a home page?.
- Fixed quite a few HTML errors in Other Resources.
- Corrected minor FAQ wording issues.
- Added a small question to the FAQ (what font is my site header?).
- Added Thoughts on Validity and Thoughts on Internet Specificity.
- Moved Southpaw to the 2022 Assorted Thoughts archive as originally intended.
- Added How to Learn.
- Scooted the "will you do [x] for me?" FAQ questions into their own section and added one about when I will do things (when I'm being paid).
- Added a mental health section to the projects page.
- Added the Coping and Self-Therapy Zipfile.
- Added Why Password Managers and MFA Matter.
- Minor About page tweaks.
- Added more image compression options to tech resources.
- Cleaned up CSS and touched up HTML for the personal pages.
- Improved the About page's contents.
- Two new resources (one on SQL indexing that's particularly interesting!) and minor FAQ tweaks.
- Added one new FAQ question: "What's the answer to [fact-based question]?". I'm getting really tired of being asked questions that a search engine could answer in under 30 seconds.
- Not strictly a site update, but Sa'eed by Infected Mushroom is worth listening to. A friend introduced me to it last night and it's fantastic.
- Published About That Journaling Thing.
- Changed site title to Owl's Roost in preparation for a custom domain name!
- Offloaded the secret site to another Neocities site. If I'm paying for supporter, then I'm using everything that gives me.
- Added Thoughts on Availability.
- Moved the 2022 assorted thoughts to an archive page that's linked on the Assorted Thoughts page. Planning to do this for every year so that the page doesn't become too unwieldy over time.
- Also moved the 2022 sitelogs for the same reason.
- Noted on my contact page that I've turned off push notifications and am offline more often than not (that's the goal!).
- Added a section of journaling links to Other Resources.
- Added numeric ratings to the pen reviews.
- Amended my thoughts on the Pilot G2 pen- it's much better than I initially gave it credit for. I may need to invest in a nicer body for its fills.
- Changed the site preview image.
- Changed the index's footer.
- Happy new year! Condensed 2022's changelogs down into a details element for easier reading in the year to come.
- CSS changes- new header font and some border-radius fun. Still tweaking to get everything just right.